View Add/Edit Patient Images screen. View Video, 1 min. 43 sec.

With Diamond Dental Software you may import and display high quality images for your patients. The image you designate as the default (usually a face shot) is displayed on various Diamond Dental Software screens for easy patient identification. These screens include Posting, Patient Entry, Appointment Setter, and the Patients Meeting Search Criteria of the patient search. On these screens, an Add/Edit Images button is seen below the image. Click this button to open the Add/Edit Patient Images screen.

Add/Edit Patient Images Screen
The Add/Edit Patient Images screen is used to acquire images into a patient’s record, and for displaying all the images for that patient. The screen displays with three basic sections, the thumbnail viewer on the left, the large selected image on the right, and the controls along the bottom. You will use the thumbnails to navigate through all the images for a patient. The thumbnails show the images for a patient in miniature and are lined up along the left side of the screen in a scrollable column. The most recently acquired images will be displayed at the top of the column and the earliest acquired images are at the bottom. As you click from thumbnail to thumbnail, the selected image will display in the large image area on the right. The thumbnails are separated from the large image area by a screen splitter. As you move your mouse over this dividing line, the mouse cursor will change to a double arrowhead. Hold down the left mouse button to drag the splitter left or right. As you move the splitter to the right you will expose a second column of thumbnails (if enough images exist). When the splitter is moved further right you will expose a third column and so on. Drag the splitter to the left to hide thumbnail columns. As you drag the screen splitter to the right the large image area will proportionally decrease in size. Likewise, dragging it to the left will make the large image area larger.

Setup
Images may be acquired from image files, scanners, intra-oral cameras, or digital cameras. Except for importing images from image files, all these different modalities will require some sort of set up before they can be used with the Diamond Dental Software program. Scanners and some intraoral cameras are TWAIN compliant image acquisition devices. Diamond Dental Software is a TWAIN aware program. Most digital cameras are now “memory based” devices and can also be used with Diamond Dental Software. Memory Based digital camera setup will be discussed shortly.

What is TWAIN
In the early days no standardization existed for scanners. If a program such as Diamond Dental Software were to utilize a particular scanner, special communicating software would have to be written just for that device. If the program were to be able to use a scanner from a different manufacturer, then special communicating software would need to be developed just for that scanner. To solve this compatibility problem, TWAIN was developed. TWAIN defines a standard software protocol and application programming interface (API) for communication between software applications and image acquisition devices. The word TWAIN is from Kipling’s “The Ballad of East and West” – “…and never the twain shall meet…”, reflecting the difficulty, at the time, of connecting scanners and personal computers. It was made upper case to make it more distinctive. This led people to believe it was an acronym for something, and the buzz was that it meant “Technology Without An Interesting Name”,  but that was just a rumor.