A study on distributed PACS

Advances in information technologies in the past decades expanded the medical information systems outside the boundaries of healthcare institutions. Currently, sharing of medical data among medical institutions for collaborative, research, training, and diagnostic purposes is a challenging topic in medicine and computer sciences. This study focuses on how virtual organizations can be created for sharing PACS archives of geographically distributed organizations. First, we introduce DIPACS 1.0 framework that we implemented for small- and medium-scale distributed organizations. Then, we propose a grid-based framework to expand DIPACS 1.0 to encompass large-scale distributed environments. We believe that grids that integrate computing, storage, and network resources of dynamic and geographically disperse organizations will provide secure, reliable, flexible, and high-performance infrastructures for next generation health information systems.