A PQRM-based PACS System for Advanced Medical Services under Grid Environment

Picture archiving and communications system (PACS) is widely used in hospitals to take medical images, to send images to radiologists or doctors and to store images into storage in a digital manner, that has brought high efficiency in a medical process. Recently, PACS is required to evolve into a more sophisticated system that can communicate with other medical systems. The existing PACS was designed to be used in a Local Area Network (LAN) of a hospital and DICOM, the standard used in PACS, doesn´t have any QoS for file transmission or security functions for an open network. Therefore, we propose a PACS system over Policy Quorum based Resource Management (PQRM) system, which manages storage resources and computing resources in Grid environment to provide satisfying advanced medical services with guaranteed QoS. Finally, we test the real situation medical scenario to prove the advanced functions our system provides and do several experiments to show the superiority of our novel system to existing PACS systems. The results indicate that while PQRM-based PACS providing the ability for advanced medical services it guarantees the transmission, provides best resource selection and disaster recovery capability.