Vivalog Technologies announced that the user base for the online medical image sharing site, MyPACS.net, has doubled in the past twelve months, to 14,000 registered users from 4,000 hospitals and imaging centers worldwide. Every month, users make 150,000 visits to the site, resulting in 2.3 million hits per month. The majority of visitors are radiologists or radiology residents, with additional traffic coming from cardiologists, pathologists, surgeons, and other physicians who work with images on a daily basis. “MyPACS.net has reached critical mass,” says Dr. Jakobovits, president of Vivalog Technologies. “The growth is self-fueling. The more users who join, the more reason there is to be part of the MyPACS community. It’s about channeling the collective expertise of the community to create an ever-growing knowledge repository that benefits everyone.” Users can sign up for free accounts and access nearly 20,000 cases for training, reference, and diagnostic decision support.

Since its inception eight years ago, users have contributed over 75,000 medical images and 700,000 lines of text to MyPACS.net. Cases are organized by anatomy and pathology, representing nearly every known disease, and radiologists can quickly scan example images of differential diagnoses, improving their confidence that they are making the right diagnosis. Nearly half of the content has been added in the past twelve months, and the rate of new cases is accelerating. “In the past six weeks, two thousand new users have signed up and over a thousand new cases have been created. At this rate, MyPACS.net will soon have well over a hundred thousand images and tens of thousand of users.”

MyPACS.net has been repeatedly called the “YouTube of Radiology”, and with good reason. “MyPACS make it as easy as possible for medical imaging professionals to share images beyond their PACS,” says Dr. Jakobovits. “They simply perform a DICOM send or upload files through their browser, and the images are automatically forwarded over the internet to MyPACS. Our software strips out any patient identifiers before they are sent, so there are no privacy concerns.”

Once the images are in MyPACS, users can easily add text, draw annotations, and tag cases with categories for quick retrieval. Users can rate each other’s cases, and the best cases rise to the top of the search results. Cases can be viewed in a web viewer that provides PACS-like features such as adjustable window/levels, zoom/pan, and scrollable series. The viewer leverages Flash and Javascript which is already resident in the browser, so there is nothing to download and install. “By combining a social networking technology with rich imaging interfaces, we have created the perfect friction-free environment for sharing images,” says Dr. Jakobovits.

Increasingly, MyPACS is being used as a platform for sharing cases with remote colleagues to solicit second opinions. “In the past, it was a lot of manual work to get a study in the hands of someone outside of your department,” says Dr. Jakobovits. “Now with MyPACS, you just push a button.”