Data grid - A distributed solution to PACS

In a hospital, various kinds of medical images acquired from different modalities are generally used and stored in different department and each modality usually attaches several workstations to display or process images. To do better diagnosis, radiologists or physicians often need to retrieve other kinds of images for reference. The traditional image storage solution is to buildup a large-scale PACs archive server. However, the disadvantages of pure centralized management of PACs archive server are obvious. Besides high costs, any failure of PACS archive server would cripple the entire PACs operation. Here we present a new approach to develop the storage grid in PACs, which can provide more reliable image storage and more efficient query/retrieval for the whole hospital applications. In this paper, we also give the performance evaluation by comparing the three popular technologies mirror, cluster and grid.