title: Potential usefulness of biological fingerprints in chest radiographs for automated patient recognition and identification.
abstract: OBJECTIVE
  The purpose of this study was to demonstrate the potential usefulness of "biological fingerprints" in chest radiographs for automated patient recognition and identification.
  
  
  METHODS
  Thoracic fields, cardiac shadows, the superior mediastinum, lung apices, a part of the right lung, and the right lower lung that includes the costophrenic angle were used as biological fingerprints in chest radiographs. Each of the biological fingerprints in a current chest radiograph was used as a template for determination of the correlation value with the corresponding biological fingerprint in a previous chest radiograph for patient recognition and identification. The overall performance of the method developed was examined in terms of receiver operating characteristic curves.
  
  
  RESULTS
  Receiver operating characteristic curves obtained with different biological fingerprints, except for the part of the right lung, indicated a high performance in identifying patients. These results showed that a new concept of biological fingerprints in radiologic images would be useful in patient recognition and identification. The low performance with the part of the right lung seems to be related to a general observation that this region does not usually include features unique to a specific patient. The performance of the artificial neural networks by use of a combination of five biological fingerprints was higher than results obtained with each biological fingerprint.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  The use of automated patient identification based on biological fingerprints in chest radiographs is promising for helping to discover misfiled patient images, especially in a picture archiving and communication system environment.
authors.affiliation: Department of Radiological Technology, Kyoto College of Medical Technology, Sonobe, Kyoto, 622-0041 Japan. morisita@kyoto.medtech.ac.jp
authors.forename: Junji
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Morishita
authors.forename: Shigehiko
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Katsuragawa
authors.forename: Yasuo
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Sasaki
authors.forename: Kunio
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Doi
mesh_terms: D003878:Dermatoglyphics; D001330:Electronic Data Processing; D006801:Humans; D007564:Japan; D010355:Patient Identification Systems; D011336:Probability; D012372:ROC Curve; D013902:Radiography, Thoracic; D011873:Radiology Information Systems; D014057:Tomography, X-Ray Computed