A distributed picture archiving and communications system for hospitals using image pre-fetching

A laboratory picture archiving and communications system for hospitals (PACS) was built which consists of a network, image acquisition stations, viewing stations, a relational database and an image storage system. Acceptable response times have been obtained by using a hierarchical image storage system and by applying pre-fetching of image data at two levels. Response times provided by a performance model are compared with measured values obtained from the real system. To keep the cost down, our PACS has been built using standard software and standard protocols wherever possible