A Plastic Surgery Interactive Surgeon's Corner Software Review

Surgeon's Corner Main

Canfield's PhotoFile Image Management Software Demo

A big question raised by the prospective digital system user is how to manage all the images. A computer should make that easy...right?

Canfield Clinical Systems hopes to make it easy with their PhotoFile Image Management Software, a database solution patterned after Microsoft's Windows Explorer (TM). This program requests a fair amount of computing muscle to make it work:

Pentium 200 Mhz (Recommends 300 Mhz or higher)
Windows 95/98/NT
32 MB of RAM (Recommends 128 MB)
Monitor running at 800x600 resolution or better
True Color Video Card (24 bit)

Canfield's Photofile demo seems to be set in a default mode for dermatology. It allows 10 patients, 20 visits and 30 images. The images are set to be acquired via TWAIN source which would include scanners and cameras, however if the images are already present on a hard drive the program seems to have problems. It attempts to import but doesn't seem to retain the images. Creating patient records is fairly simple. These records have underlying sections based upon visit dates. There are diagnostic keywords for dermatology (acne, etc), but no procedure codes. These were simply programmed for Plastic Surgery in several minutes. The demo didn't seem to have available help menus as when these were clicked the help files could not be found. The database function could not be tested as the images could not be acquired making for a short ten minute review process.

Most disturbing of all was the fact that although the acquire screens indicated that files would not be deleted in acquisition, my entire 1999 directory was deleted when the program tried to acquire files from my hard drive. If I had not backed up these files, my documentation for this year would have suffered greatly. On this basis, the Canfield Photofile system cannot be completely evaluated from the demo sent. From what I see, the program is slated for dematologists and is of questionable usefulness to Plastic Surgeons. Furthermore, any surgeons requesting the demo are forewarned to back-up their images before manipulating them via this software.