CAESARS: the cardiac echo storage and retrieval network system

The development of a software package for cardiac echo data management, called CAESARS, is described. Using an IBM-compatible personal computer, data comprising the results of 13000 echocardiographic investigations were stored with the help of a simple database program. For each echocardiographic study a number of standard measurements and basic variables were entered. A descriptive code was used to diminish the amount of memory required to store both the diagnosis and left ventricular wall motion-data. The introduction of a local area network, providing the data to other users, made the development of a translation program inevitable, to encrypt the coded diagnosis back into natural language. Besides this 'translator' several tools were integrated in the package, making this large amount of data more easily accessible for research.<>