Thursday, April 26, 2007
PACS-Neutral DICOM Archive?
A recent thread on the Auntminnie.com PACS forum was begun with a request for information about a "vendor-neutral PACS storage solution". The thread quickly bifurcated into two distinctly different paths.
One path provided information about a storage solution for a PACS (Picture Archiving and Communications System) that would be vendor-neutral with respect to the actual storage media being used. This is the concept of building a storage solution based on storage media from a variety of vendors. For example a NAS Head (or gateway server) is connected to the PACS Archive Server and the actual storage media (RAID) could be purchased over time from multiple vendors. The advantage of this storage media neutral solution is that the buyer would be able to purchase the storage media on an "as needed" basis and shop the market each time for the best price.
The Second path provided information about DICOM Archive solutions that would be vendor-neutral with respect to the variety of PACS that could be interfaced to it. This is the concept of a neutral, DICOM-conformant Archive that would manage medical image study data over the full course of its lifetime. Of necessity this would mean that the Archive would have a practical lifetime of 10 to 20 years. The hardware (servers and storage media) would be replaced at the appropriate intervals, and the software would undergo routine upgrades, but the study data itself would be managed for as long as legally required or deemed useful. By design this Archive would survive multiple PACS (systems), which are typically replaced every 5 to 7 years.
While the advantage of a media-neutral storage solution is significant, the advantages of a PACS-neutral Archive are compelling. A PACS-neutral Archive would by definition mean the end of Data Migration. Migrating data from the old PACS to the new PACS is nearly always required because there are still significant differences in the way PACS vendors store data objects and preserve key study-related information in the DICOM header. A PACS-neutral Archive would accommodate these differences by translating the study data format of PACS A into the study data format of PACS B, and visa versa. This effectively eliminates the need to migrate the data from PACS A to PACS B, because the PACS-neutral DICOM Archive is the long-term archive managing the true DICOM-conformant version of the study data.
You can read more about this new PACS Paradigm from my postings to this thread, and much more detail is available in the form of a white paper on the subject titled "Building a Better Medical Image Archive". The white paper can be obtained by forwarding your request to Michael Gray at graycons@well.com
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