An Efficient and Reliable Architecture for Distributing Medical Imaging Data

Currently, physicians rely on a set of technological innovation steps to execute an accurate, efficient, and fast diagnosis. The medical imaging laboratories represent here a foundation stone in the clinical medical practice. Medical imaging provides a reliable and non-invasive technique to a lot of health issues in a patient. As such, the medical imaging amount of data has been growing exponentially during the past few years. The big data generated is managed by Picture Archiving and Communication Systems (PACS) in a healthcare network. Until recent years, PACS have been handling data correctly. But, as the data grows and the quality of the medical imaging modalities available in the market also grow, these systems are struggling regarding efficiency and storage capabilities. It becomes an emergency to provide practitioners with a reliable way of distributing medical images that is most efficient and fault tolerant. In this work, we present an architecture fully decentralized so there is no single point of failure, providing features as redundancy and high availability. Moreover, we aimed at efficiently sharing medical data between physicians. We integrated the proposed architecture into a Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) PACS. The results are promising and reveal that our solution may be a good starting point to revolutionize the storage and distribution of medical images.