Towards a deconstructed PACS-as-a-service system

Abstract

Traditional Picture Archiving and Communication Systems (PACS) were designed for vendor-specific environments, dedicated radiology workstations and scanner consoles. These kinds of systems are becoming obsolete due to two main reasons. Firstly, they don’t satisfy the long-standing need in healthcare to put all the resources related to the patient into a single solution rather than a multitude of partial solutions. And secondly, communication, storage and security technologies have demonstrated that they are mature enough to support this demand in other fields. “Vendor Neutral Archives” are becoming the new trend in medical imaging storage and “deconstructed PACS” goes one step beyond proposing a totally decoupled implementation. Our work combines this implementation with the scalability and ubiquitous availability of cloud solutions and internet technologies to provide an architecture of a PACS-as-a-service system that handles a simple enterprise workflow orchestration of tele-radiology.