Patent ID: 7050611

Claim:
A method for screening medical cases comprising the steps of: a.) storing a multiplicity of medical cases each of which contain a group of images of a particular portion of a patient's anatomy, the views of the images of all groups for all medical cases being the same; b.) establishing a preselected order of the medical cases; c.) providing a user interface with a set of icons, each individual icon representing a specification (i) for a designation of a particular view of an image of the group of images and (ii) for the processing thereof; d.) establishing a common workflow containing a plurality of serially arranged data fields; e.) interrelating the common workflow with the medical eases to screen orderly one by one; f.) preprogramming a sub-set of the set of icons into a preselected order corresponding to the serially arranged data fields of the common workflow by the user selecting the sub-set of icons and the order; g.) loading the specifications represented by the ordered sub-set of icons of the set of icons into the corresponding data fields of the common workflow; h.) coupling the user interface to the common workflow whereby a user can control stepping through the serial data fields; i.) in response to a user stepping to a data field, retrieving from the store of medical cases the specified particular view of an image of the current medical case being screened, processing as specified by the data field, and storing in the data field of the common workflow; j.) whereby an ordered sequence of preselected specified images of each medical case can be viewed, one by one, as derived from the stored groups of images for all said medical cases; k.) displaying, for viewing by a user, each ordered sequence of said preselected specified images derived from the stored images of each said medical case, in order, one after the other; and l.) controlling the stepping through the serially arranged data fields to view the ordered sequence of said preselected specified images derived from the stored images of each medical case by a user initiating only a single action input to move the workflow from each current serial data field to the next successive serial data field.