PACS Medical Imaging Data Storage

Introduction

Medical imaging has undergone rapid change over the past several years. Photographs, x-rays and MRI scans are now all digitized and often managed by PACS application software. Now doctors can retrieve images on-line in real-time while treating the patient without waiting for the physical transportation of film. This technology has greatly improved the efficiency in the doctor-patient relationship and in some cases makes a difference in the outcome due to the instant availability of critical diagnostic information.

Like all new technologies, this one also comes with new challenges. A key issue is how long to keep the data online. New HIPAA and e-mail regulations are dramatically increasing the length of time required for on-line access to data and thus this is putting pressure on the storage capacity and ultimately the total cost of storing the data.

Until recently, it was prohibitively expensive to store years of image data on-line. All sorts of near-line storage alternatives including optical disk and tape device were used to reduce the cost of on-line data. These approaches came with inconvenience, mechanical complexity, lower reliability and slow access times. Today, new data can be stored on primary storage for immediate access to current images and then archived to SATA secondary storage. SATA storage cost is under $750 per terabyte in volume. One terabyte stores a million images of 1 MB each at a cost of only 75 cents per thousand images. SATA systems store up to 236 TB in a single rack in just six square feet of floor space. SATA storage is also perfect for remote disaster recovery, replacing tape.

How It Works

High capacity, low cost FlashDisk SATA disk arrays can be included into any environment using industry standard Fibre Channel interfaces and support standard RAID protection. The storage can be directly attached or incorporated into a SAN or NAS environment. Typically, the volume of imaging data grows every day so the FlashDisk SATA storage systems were designed with expansion in mind. Storage capacity can be easily added on-line while everything including the application, servers and storage are still running.

	The diagram depicts a group of servers sharing a medical imaging library. Thousands of authorized medical practitioners enjoy instant access to millions of medical images.