Realizing a Generic Medical Image Repository for System of Systems

Ever since medical images were digitized in the late 1970fs, there has been an explosion of diagnostic digital imaging techniques and procedures. Medical information systems have embraced the advances in technology to provide better health care for the patients and significant workflow improvements for the hospitals. This has led to a noteworthy evolution of medical information systems over the last few decades. From what used to be single stand alone modalities, the evolution has passed through cluster of modalities; multi modality clusters in a single hospital and has now reached a stage where in we have an enterprise network connecting many such hospitals thereby creating a system of systems. Medical image repositories form a critical subsystem in the medical systems of systems. They have a diverse role to play in any hospital starting from storing of electronic patient records and scanned medical images generated by individual modalities like X-Ray and MR to storing of data in an enterprise hospital network. This paper discusses the challenges faced by a medical image repository used in the context of a system of systems and how we have realized the image repository to handle these challenges