Enhanced regional network for medical imaging repositories

Nowadays PACS (Picture Archive and Communication System) tends to integrate Web-based technologies in processes associated to storage, distribution and visualization of medical images, creating the general abstraction of distributed PACS. Although PACS integration with web-based technologies offer significant advantages to healthcare institutions, it is crucial that information technology based issues do not impose constraints in the medical practice workflow. Therefore, distributed PACS have to deal with performance issues in both storing and retrieving of large amounts of data across distinct systems, possibly hosted on different locations. This paper proposes an approach to reduce data transference footprint in a distributed PACS environment with DICOM-Ready applications. The proposed method provides a high level control of transference parameters, such as, number of connections, number of fragments and size of each fragment. The result was a highly tunable data stream that can be used in any distributed PACS environment.