Automated medical imaging system maintenance diagnostics

• US 6,865,512 B2
• Filed: 11/12/2002
• Issued: 03/08/2005
• Est. Priority Date: 11/12/2002
• Status: Expired due to Fees

• Current Assignee: Koninklijke Philips Electronics N.V. (Koninklijke Philips N.V.)
• Original Assignee: Koninklijke Philips Electronics N.V. (Koninklijke Philips N.V.)
• Inventors: Hendrickson, David
• Primary Examiner(s): Hoff, Marc S.
• Assistant Examiner(s): Charioui, Mohamed
• Application Number:
  US10/293,430
• Publication Number:
  US 20040093184A1
• Time in Patent Office: 847 Days
• Field of Search: 702/32, 702/59, 702/60, 702/61, 702/62, 702 66- 68, 702/80, 702/81, 702/119, 702/122, 702/123, 702/168, 702/171, 702176-178, 702182-185, 714/26, 714/37, 700/90, 382/141, 600/437
• US Class Current: 702/183
• CPC Class Codes: G16H 40/40 for the management of medical equipment or devices, e.g. scheduling maintenance or upgrades

Abstract

A medical imaging system diagnostics package includes the ability to analyze operator usage data to detect aspects of the manner in which the system is used which may be a source of operating problems. Detecting problems arising from the manner in which the system is used can reduce the number of “no trouble found” repair calls and can often be permanently resolved by additional operator training in the use of the system. The diagnostic package includes the ability to assess the effects of software aging by analyzing the status of components of the medical system which are used by software such as registers, memory and disk drives. The results of this analysis can be used to improve software performance which is degraded but not failing completely such as system slowdowns and lengthened response times.

Claims

1. A medical diagnostic imaging system, including hardware components operated by software stored on and utilized by the system to conduct a diagnostic imaging procedure, and an imaging system maintenance system comprising:

a maintenance program, responsive to operator initiation and coupled to hardware components of the imaging system, which receives inputs from components interacting with the software stored on and utilized by the system for the detection of conditions of software aging which degrades system performance; and

a display responsive to the maintenance program which presents the results obtained by the maintenance program.

2. The medical diagnostic imaging system of claim 1, wherein the display is responsive to the maintenance program to recommend a course of action to resolve a software aging problem.

3. The medical diagnostic imaging system of claim 2, wherein the display is responsive to the maintenance program to recommend adding system resources.

4. The medical diagnostic imaging system of claim 2, wherein the display is responsive to the maintenance program to recommend rebooting the system to address a software aging condition.

5. The medical diagnostic imaging system of claim 2, wherein the implementation of the recommended course of action improves the system response time.

6. The medical diagnostic imaging system of claim 2, wherein the display is further responsive to the maintenance program to present an operator selection which, when selected, at least partially remedies a software aging condition.

7. The medical diagnostic imaging system of claim 1, wherein the conditions of software aging include one or more of the number of temporary files;

the number of backup files.;

the number of saved lost files;

the number of browser history files;

the amount of hard drive free storage;

hard drive fragmentation;

the number of committed bytes;

the number of pages read per second;

the total number of bytes received per second;

or the disk access time.