A medical image archive solution in the cloud

Growing long-term cost of managing an onsite medical imaging archive has been a subject which the health care industry struggles with. Based on the current trend, it is estimated that over 1 billion diagnostic imaging procedures will be performed in the United States during year 2014, generating about 100 Petabytes of data. The high volume of medical images is leading to scalability and maintenance issues with healthcare providers´ onsite picture archiving and communication system (PACS) and network. Cloud computing promises lower cost, high scalability, availability and disaster recoverability which can be a natural solution some of the problems we faced for long-term medical image archive. A prototype system was implemented to study such as solution on one of the industry leading cloud computing platform, Microsoft Windows Azure. It includes a Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) server which handles standard store/query/retrieve requests; a DICOM image indexer that parses the metadata and store them in a SQL Azure database; and a web UI for searching and viewing archived images based on patient and image attributes. The comprehensive tools and functionality of Windows Azure made it an ideal platform to develop and deploy this kind of service oriented applications.