PACS provides a consistent model to communicate and to store images with recent additions to fault tolerance and disaster reliability. However PACS still lacks fine granulated user based authentication and authorization, flexible data distribution, and semantic associations between images and their embedded information. These are critical components for future Enterprise operations in dynamic medical research and health care environments. Here we introduce a flexible Grid based model of a PACS in order to add these methods and to describe its implementation in the Children's Oncology Group (COG) Grid. The combination of existing standards for medical images, DICOM, and the abstraction to files and meta catalog information in the Grid domain provides new flexibility beyond traditional PACS design. We conclude that Grid technology demonstrates a reliable and efficient distributed informatics infrastructure which is well applicable to medical informatics as described in this work. Grid technology will provide new opportunities for PACS deployment and subsequently new medical image applications.

Date Published: 16 March 2006
PDF: 6 pages
Proc. SPIE 6145, Medical Imaging 2006: PACS and Imaging Informatics, 61450V (16 March 2006); doi: 10.1117/12.654514

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 6145:
Medical Imaging 2006: PACS and Imaging Informatics
Steven C. Horii; Osman M. Ratib, Editor(s)