Technology overview

Today, with the advent of PACS and the DICOM standard, patient information can be shared electronically and near-instantaneously by digital imaging users using a host of modality, computer hardware and imaging software vendors. With PACS and DICOM, medical imaging has been propelled into the digital media age. DICOM is the standard by which modality and system vendors ensure interoperability, reducing costs of imaging at hospitals, clinics, and imaging centers alike. As long as modalities and PACS products adhere to this standard, images can be readily shared among disparate systems.

Software vendors, recognizing the opportunity to meet these needs, have flooded the market with a wide range of high to low-end PACS solutions. These solutions, for the most part, deliver digital imaging capability, but also introduce new issues for smaller digital imaging users such as imaging centers, clinics, and small hospitals. These issues include:

• Prohibitively high prices. Ranging in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, many systems are well beyond the budget of smaller medical organizations.
• System complexity. Most PACS systems require understanding of how to operate and maintain a general purpose server, manage and add-on to peripheral subsystems, and operate and maintain the PACS application, burdening imaging center system administrators who already perform multiple roles and manage a wide range of equipment and applications.
• Management and administration overhead. PACS systems require administration, servicing, and support systems, peripherals, storage, and software, posing significant workload for lightly staffed imaging centers and clinics.

In considering alternatives, imaging center managers and owners should face up to a fundamental fact: existing PACS solutions are general-purpose systems that require more capital and more system administration than most imaging centers can support. This is particularly true if they have not yet made the conversion to digital medical imaging. Moreover, even centers that have made the conversion now face the same IT issues as other businesses: how to balance exponential storage growth and increasing user demands against a limited capital and staffing resources. Obviously, effective solution to these problems requires a radical departure from conventional PACS systems, whose design is rooted in serving IT-heavy hospitals. Solving the problem calls for building a system from the ground up specifically targeting the budget, maintenance, and staffing limitations of imaging centers and clinics. Candelis, a company with deep technology expertise in enterprise IT appliances, has taken precisely this approach. The result: ImageGrid, a DICOM appliance that serves, routes, and provides cost-effective storage from 1 to tens of terabytes. Designed for easy deployment, simple administration, and high reliability, ImageGrid is purpose-built for the imaging center environment.

The result: ImageGrid, a PACS appliance that serves, routes, and provides cost-effective storage from 1 to tens of terabytes. Designed for easy deployment, simple administration, and high reliability, ImageGrid is a feature rich solution which has been optimized for medical images.