A multi-domain platform for medical imaging

The increasing adoption of medical imaging equipment in healthcare has been leading to a huge dispersion of data repositories and institutions. Although the quality of diagnostic and treatment is deeply dependent on the health information that is available for physicians, several legal and technological issues have hindered the integration of these data. One of such problems is because traditional medical imaging protocols do not perform well in inter-institutional scenarios. This paper describes a hybrid network platform for medical imaging systems that provides searching and retrieval over multiple centres. Three key components support the system: an indexing engine, a multicast framework and a cloud service. Using a peer-to-peer paradigm with security constraints, the platform gathers the information of medical imaging repositories hosted inside the institutions, allowing physicians to access data when and where they need it.