Redundancy in Processing of Medical Image Data

The Regional PACS (Picture Archiving and Communication System) Project, MeDiMed (Metropolitan Digital Imaging in Medicine), an advanced system for the support of processing of medical image information, started as a collaborative effort among hospitals in the city of Brno to process medical multimedia data. Masaryk University is the coordinator of this project ensuring that the demands and requirements of radiology departments are met and overseeing the changing legislative standards and the practical possibilities of technology. Masaryk University, in cooperation with CESNET (the Czech National Research and Education Network Operator), also provides the necessary network infrastructure. The open system described in this paper was, from the start, designed to serve also as a reliable and accessible communication node and as an educational and research tool available to any hospital or another healthcare institution, including medical faculties, that participated in the system. The regional system is designed as a combination of distributed architecture in terms of incorporated hospital data centres and centralized architecture as the image studies are continuously being sent to the long-term broadly accessible archive in the centre.