www.centauro.it Rivista di Neuroradiologia 16: 947-952, 2003 947 Material and Methods A prototype software program called RADCAD, has been deve- loped using Sun Microsystems’ Java[TM] platform. This may be used once images have been tran- sferred by network or CD to a viewing PC operating Microsoft ® Windows ® 95 or higher. The computer needs to have as a minimum requirement a Pen- tium 200 MHz or faster processor with a minimum of 64 Mbytes of RAM and 50 Mbytes of free disc space. RADCAD also requires the Java 2 platform with runtime version 1.3.1 or higher. The hard drive space required for the library database is 20 G- bytes. At present RADCAD con- sists of a database of 900 cases; 350 cases being annotated as hav- ing no localized abnormality in the brain (nil focal) and 450 cases annotated as having some local- ized lesion. The Human Research Ethics Committee of the Sir Charles Gairdner Hospital,within the De- partment of Health, Government of Western Australia gave ap- proval for the initial release of 900 anonymised cranial CT studies for Trial 2000-136. Subsequent approval in 2002 has been given for a further 300 Introduction There seemed value in produc- ing a software program that could assist those involved with the in- terpretation of cranial CT scans. Initially it was developed as a teaching and training tool to assist a user’s preliminary exposure to cranial CT, so medical students and trainee radiologists, as well as specialist radiologists, were a po- tential market. Although CT images were his- torically interpreted mostly by neuroradiologists, as the general radiologist becomes increasingly familiar with CT of the body, the- re has been an increasing trend for cranial CT to be interpreted by generalists. The latter have reported diffi- culties associated with handling the detailed intracranial anatomy as well as with the extensive list of possible pathological conditions. It has also been reported from The American College of Radio- logy that the workload for radiolo- gists is increasing annually at a ra- te of 4.5% whereas the net growth rate of practicing radiologists is only about 2% 1 . Thus any aid to allow a relative shortage of specialists to deal with more work would seem to be ti- mely. anonymised studies to be released for future work. RADCAD has the facility to view the histopathology of cases of brain tumour. The Western Au- stralian Centre for Pathology and Medical Research (PathCentre) have contributed anonymised hi- stological examples, together with descriptive text, of brain tumours classified according to the World Health Organisation classification of tumours of the nervous system 2 . The program also has the abi- lity to automatically select a slice from the database case at appro- ximately the same anatomical le- vel as the current case to be dia- gnosed 3 . The images in the RADCAD database were all acquired using a General Electric (GE) Medical Systems HiSpeed CT/i scanner, as that is the machine installed at Sir Charles Gairdner Hospital. However, the program is plan- ned to allow image contributions to the database from machines produced by other manufacturers. The RADCAD database can be searched using information su- ch as pathology abnormality clas- sification, location and the quality of example to be found.The data- base also allows the search to be refined in terms of patient gender and age, and can find series types Computer-Assisted Diagnosis of Cranial CT Scans L.A.CALA* , **, K. PARKER*, I. EMELYANOVA*, N. HICKS***, P. ROBBINS****, Y.ATTIKIOUZEL*, K. MICHALAK*, J. DEVENISH*, J. KOSEK*, F.L. MASTAGLIA***** ** A ustralian Research Centre for Medical Engineering (A RCME), the University of Western A ustralia and * Murdoch University, Murdoch, *** Sir Charles Gairdner Hospital, Nedlands, **** The Western A ustralian Centre for Pathology and Medical Research (PathCentre), Nedlands, ***** Centre for Neuromuscular and Neurological Disorders, The University of Western A ustralia;A ustralia Key words: computer-assisted diagnosis, CAD, cranial CT