CHILI Newsletter No. 3/2009

Scalable Blade System

11th DICOM Meeting in Mainz, Germany:

Ongoing Trends in PACS and Teleradiology

July 03, 2009

Dr. Uwe Engelmann gave a lecture on Ongoing Trends in PACS and Teleradiology.

Technical advances and new forms of collaboration constantly change architectures and implementations of PACS and teleradiology solutions.

As far as data storage systems are concerned, there is a clear trend towards corporate archives, where image files are also saved and protected from editing, becoming established.
When it comes to servers, there is a trend towards virtualisation (and away from metal). This simplifies scalability and increases reliability. In terms of hardware, scalable blade systems are now gaining popularity.
Several organizations (e.g. medical practices and hospitals) now share modalities and even archives. Several IT systems (e.g. KIS, medical practice systems) need to be able to generate examination orders simultaneously (worklist multiplexing) and then save the images produced in various archives and client-based archives (logical/physical).
To support communication between different organizations, telemedicine or corporate files are being created, in which EPA, PACS and image distribution all melt into one, although the original data remains referenced.
Teleradiology is playing an ever increasing role; in particular ad-hoc communication via DICOM e-mail. Communication is increasingly routed via (local) star networks rather than via point-to-point connections. QA standards for TR in accordance with DIN standards are now becoming available.
Image distribution is now no longer a one-way street for image display, but also allows data to be passed on or imported to the web server and other downstream systems, with IHE profiles (e.g. IRWF) playing an important role.

Conclusions
Technical innovation and new forms of collaboration are resulting in new system architectures and systems. Following these trends can be very beneficial when implementing your own IT system.

You will find the lecture here.
If you have any questions, please call us at +49-(0)6221-18079-10 or mail us at info@chili-radiology.com.

Heidelberg, July 2009

Kind regards from the CHILI Team