Director Matthew Budoff, M.D.
Location St. John’s Cardiovascular Research Center
Email mbudoff@labiomed.org
Phone #
Description The CT reading center has served as the central reading for many NIH supported multicenter national studies.
Calcium Reading Workstations:
The heart of the reading center is a group of image processing Sun Ultra 60 workstations. There are three workstations. Each workstation has a Sun Creator 3D Graphics intensive processing card and a server which can hold thousands of studies with an internal RAID Mirror configuration with 100 GB of usable hard drive space. In addition to the above workstation, the Reading Center has access to a fourth Sun Ultra 60, with dual CPUs and an additional MOD interfaced drive, off-campus at the University of California, Irvine.
Workstation Software:
Each workstation runs on the latest Sun Operating System, Solaris 8. This provides a very stable and fast networking environment, which allows us to receive process and evaluate images. Each workstation is equipped with a DICOM receiver allowing us to obtain images from various scanning sites. The receiver works in such a way that when an authorized site sends data, it will receive and store it even if unattended. This allows for data transmission when the data manager is not present or when another user is on the workstation for other purposes. Other software installed include a C++ compiler for use by programmers, and RAID management system, VERITAS Volume Manager, which allows to retrieve data from mirrored disks in the event of hardware failure.
CT Angiography Reading:
The CT reading center also serves to read CT angiograms (non-invasive angiograms) for multicenter trials. The Reading center has 5 different workstations for 3-dimensional reconstruction of the CT angiograms. There is also a dedicated server to receive and distribute studies to the readers.
Seven physicians (cardiologists and cardiac radiologists), plus ancillary support personnel, including data managers, computer IT support and secretarial staff make up the reading center.