Patent ID: 7444008

Claim:
A method for automatically processing studies acquired by an imaging examination system having a first computer connected via a network to a plurality of further computers, said method comprising the steps of: for each study in a plurality of studies, comprising study data, acquired by said imaging examination system, assigning a priority code indicating a relative priority for processing that study; dependent on said priority code, either immediately processing said study on said first computer by automatically diagnostically analyzing the study data thereof in said first computer to produce a medical finding, or intermediately storing the study data of said study in a memory device for later processing of the study data and allocating respective identifiers, in a processing job list, to all studies stored in said memory and, at respective later points in time, processing the respective study data of the studies stored in the memory in said processing job list according to a predetermined sequence; and for processing the respective study data of the studies stored in said memory at said respective later points in time, checking respective availabilities of said further computers for processing one of said studies according to said processing job list, and communicating one of said studies according to said processing job list to one of said further computers having availability and automatically diagnostically analyzing the study data thereof in said one of said other computers having availability to produce a medical finding.