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User Guide

This guide will help you understand how to use RADIS for managing and searching radiology reports.

How RADIS Works

RADIS acts as a centralized repository for radiology reports, providing powerful search capabilities and organizational tools:

  1. Reports are stored with structured metadata (patient info, study details, modalities, etc.)
  2. You search using natural language queries with optional filters
  3. RADIS processes your query with full-text search, combined with semantic (meaning-based) search when your administrator has configured it
  4. You receive ranked results matching your criteria
  5. You organize reports into collections, add notes, and subscribe to searches
  6. AI assists you by labeling reports, extracting structured data, and answering questions about a report

Functionalities Overview

After logging in, the menu at the top of every page leads to these sections:

  • Search: Search for reports using text queries and filters
  • Collections: Organize reports into custom collections
  • Subscriptions: Get notified about new reports that match your criteria, with AI-based filtering and data extraction
  • Notes: View and manage notes you've added to reports
  • Extractions: Extract structured data from many reports at once using AI
  • Chats: Interactive chat interface with AI

Main Features

1. Search Reports

The search feature is the core of RADIS, allowing you to find relevant reports quickly:

  1. Navigate to the "Search" section
  2. Enter your search query in the search box
  3. Apply filters as needed on the right-hand side
  4. Review the search results

Search Syntax

  • Case-insensitive: Search terms are not case-sensitive
  • AND queries: All terms must match (implicit AND between terms, or write AND explicitly)
  • OR operator: Use capital OR between terms (e.g., fracture OR lesion)
  • NOT operator: Use capital NOT to exclude a term (e.g., pneumonia NOT metastasis)
  • Phrases: Use quotes for exact matches (e.g., "lung cancer")
  • Grouping: Use parentheses to combine operators (e.g., (fracture OR lesion) NOT metastasis)

Operators must be written in capital letters; or, and, and not in lowercase are treated as ordinary search terms. A minus sign in front of a term does not exclude it, wildcards such as pneumo* are not supported (the * is dropped), and field:value syntax is not supported — the whole field:value token is removed; use the filters instead. A query is required (filters alone do not search) and may be at most 200 characters long.

If your query contains mistakes such as unbalanced quotes or parentheses, unsupported characters, or stray operators, RADIS repairs it and shows a "Fixed invalid query" notice above the results with the query it actually ran.

When your administrator has configured an embedding model, every search combines classic keyword matching with semantic search, which also finds reports that describe the same thing in different words. This happens automatically; there is no switch to turn it on or off. Each result shows the scores that determined its ranking.

Available Filters

  • Language: Filter by report language. The default "All" searches reports in every language
  • Modalities: Filter by imaging modality (CT, MRI, X-ray, etc.)
  • Labels: Only show reports that carry at least one of the selected labels (see Labels). This filter only appears when labels have been set up
  • Study Date: Filter by date range (from/till)
  • Study Description: Filter by study description (partial match)
  • Patient Sex: All, Male, or Female
  • Age Range: Filter by patient age using the range slider (in steps of 10 years)

Use "Reset filters" to clear all filters at once.

Search Results

Each result shows the patient age and sex, modalities, study description and the scores that determined its rank, followed by a highlighted excerpt of the report. Click "Show full report" to read the entire text. Results are paginated; the page size can be changed below the list. Each result panel has buttons to open the report details, add the report to a collection, add a note, start a chat about the report, and open the study in your PACS viewer.

The report details page shows all metadata of a report (document ID, patient, study, accession number, modalities, additional metadata), its labels, and the full text. The arrows next to the Patient ID open a list of the same patient's earlier reports, later reports, or all reports.

2. Labels

Administrators can define labels (e.g. "Pulmonary nodule" or "Fracture") that RADIS assigns to reports automatically using AI. Each label is classified as Present, Likely, or Possible when the report supports it; reports where the label is absent or not mentioned carry no badge.

  • Labels appear as badges on the report detail page, grouped by their label group. Hover over a badge to see whether the finding is Present, Likely, or Possible
  • A greyed-out badge means the report or the label definition changed since the label was assigned. A changed report is re-labeled by the next nightly run; a changed label definition is only refreshed when an administrator runs a backfill
  • Use the Labels filter in the search to find all reports carrying a label. Selecting several labels finds reports that carry any of them

Labels cannot be edited by users. If a label seems wrong or missing, contact your administrator.

3. Collections

Collections allow you to organize reports for easy access:

  1. Go to the "Collections" section to view your collections
  2. Click "Add new collection" to create a new collection
  3. Add reports to collections by clicking the collection button on report panels. The same dialog removes a report from a collection again and preselects the collection you used last
  4. View collection contents by clicking on the collection name. A collection page has buttons to rename, export (as an Excel spreadsheet with the report metadata and text), or delete the collection

Collections are useful for:

  • Grouping cases for research or review
  • Creating teaching file collections
  • Organizing reports by project or study

4. Notes

Add personal notes to reports for additional context:

  1. Click the note button on any report panel (in search results, collections, subscription inboxes, or the report details) to add or edit your note
  2. Save a note with empty text to delete it
  3. View and search all your notes in the "Notes" section
  4. Notes are private to your user account

5. Subscriptions

Set up subscriptions to be notified when new reports match your criteria. RADIS checks for new reports every hour. Optionally, an AI model screens each new report with your questions and extracts data from it:

  1. Navigate to the "Subscriptions" section
  2. Click "Add Subscription"
  3. Enter a Name for the subscription
  4. Narrow down the reports with the filters on the right: Patient ID, Language, Modalities, Study Description, Patient Sex, and Age Range
  5. Optionally add up to three Filter Questions. Each is a yes/no question about the report (e.g. "Does the report describe a new pulmonary nodule?") together with the answer that should be accepted (Yes or No). A report only enters your inbox when the AI's answer to every question matches
  6. Optionally add up to ten Extraction Fields to have data extracted from every matching report. Each field has a Name, a Description telling the AI what to extract, and an Output Type (Text, Numeric, Boolean, or Selection with a fixed list of options). Use the [ ] toggle next to the type to collect multiple values per report
  7. Check "Notify me via mail of new reports" if you want an email whenever a refresh finds new reports
  8. Save the subscription

Only reports that arrive (or are updated) after the subscription was created are considered; existing reports are not searched retroactively.

A subscription belongs to the group that was active when you created it and keeps collecting that group's reports even if you switch your active group later. The inbox always lists them, but a report only opens if it belongs to your active group, so you may need to switch back to that group. The report links in the notification mail work the same way. If you are removed from that group, the subscription pauses until you are a member again.

Inbox

The subscription list shows how many reports each subscription has collected, with a badge for reports you have not looked at yet. Click the count to open the inbox:

  • Each matched report is shown with its header, a preview of the text, and — if you defined extraction fields — the extracted values
  • Sort by arrival or study date, and narrow the list with the filters on the side (Patient ID, Study Description, Study Date, Modalities)
  • Click "Download Extractions as CSV" to export the extracted values as a spreadsheet. Only reports with extracted values are included, so the file is empty for a subscription without extraction fields
  • Opening the inbox marks its reports as seen

Use the "Edit" and "Delete" buttons on the subscription page to change or remove a subscription. Changes apply to future refreshes only; reports already in the inbox stay there.

6. Extractions

Extraction jobs let you pull structured data out of many reports at once. Creating a job takes three steps:

Step 1 – Define fields. Add one to five fields that you want extracted from each report. For each field, specify:

  • Name: A short column name for the results
  • Description: What the AI should extract (e.g. "Largest diameter of the primary tumor in mm")
  • Output Type: Text, Numeric, Boolean, or Selection. For Selection, enter the allowed options (up to seven)
  • The [ ] toggle next to the type switches the field to an array, so multiple values of that type are returned per report (e.g. a list of all affected vertebrae)

Step 2 – Search query. Enter a job title. Unless your administrator has turned this off, RADIS generates a search query from your field descriptions, which you can edit or replace. Apply filters (Language, Modalities, Study Date, Study Description, Patient Sex, Age Range) to narrow down the reports. A live counter shows how many reports the job will process. A job may cover at most 25,000 reports (your administrator may have set a different limit); a search matching more is refused, so narrow it down until the counter shows a number. A search matching no reports is refused as well, since there would be nothing to extract. Unlike the regular search, an extraction job covers exactly the reports whose text matches the query — no semantically similar reports are added. Click "Preview Search Results" to open the matching reports in the regular search view in a new tab.

Step 3 – Review & submit. Check the summary, optionally tick "Notify me via Email when job is finished", and click "Create Extraction Job".

Jobs of regular users start in the "Unverified" state and are queued once an administrator has verified them. On the job page you can follow the progress of the individual tasks and, once results come in:

  • Click View Results to browse the extracted values in a table with one column per field
  • Click Download CSV to export the table
  • Use the control panel to cancel a running job, resume a canceled one, retry failed tasks, or delete the job. Administrators additionally see buttons to verify a job and to restart it entirely
  • Click a task to see its reports and the extracted values per report

The "Extractions" menu item opens the wizard directly; click "Previous Jobs" in step 2 of the wizard (or "Job List" on a job page) to see all your jobs. Administrators can lock the Extractions section temporarily, e.g. during maintenance; you then see a notice instead of the wizard.

7. Chats (AI Assistant)

The Chats feature provides an interactive AI assistant:

  • Start a chat from a report panel to ask questions about that report in natural language
  • Click "New chat" in the "Chats" section for a general conversation that is not tied to a report
  • The "Chats" section lists your previous chats with automatically generated titles; you can delete a single chat or clear all of them
  • A message may be at most 1,000 characters long

RADIS Client

RADIS Client is a Python library to create, retrieve, update and delete reports without using the web interface. It does not search reports; use the web interface for that.

The reports API is restricted to staff users, so you need an API token of a staff account. For instructions on generating an API token, refer to the Admin Guide.