Medical archiving: solutions for medical image management

Within the field of radiology, innovations in digital imaging have led to the development of the picture archival and communication system (PACS), which is now a part of the fundamental technological infrastructure supporting radiology practice in the digital age. Healthcare providers like hospitals, outpatient centers, and clinics are facing an explosion of medical imaging content as the industry continues the transfer from film to digital format. As a result, providers need to rethink their storage architecture strategies to better address the varied applications of the modern healthcare organization. Digital medical images are typically very large and technological advances are constantly increasing the rate at which such data is being recorded, image volume can present a storage capacity challenge. In addition, the images must be safely stored for a long time and easy to access. Regardless of strategy, the continued deployment of PACS as the primary vehicle to streamline medical imaging workflow, manage image access and increase user productivity is important. Grid computing, typically associated with the capture of idle computational cycles on heterogeneous servers, employs computing techniques that can offer providers unique solutions to their storage problems.