Decentralizing the storage of a DICOM compliant PACS

Nowadays, the medical imaging laboratories are an important piece in the diagnosis within the healthcare institutions. Every day, medical imaging modalities generate new data and the growth over the last recent years has been exponential. The storage and distribution of such data is orchestrated by the Picture Archiving and Communication System (PACS) but the current technologies are facing new challenges. On one hand, the massive amount of data requires a huge local infrastructure to handle the load, which may be expensive. On the other hand, the outsourcing of the data to cloud services may be slow and not compliant with regulations. It becomes urgent to investigate new ways to handle the storage and distribution of the medical images in an healthcare institution. In this work, we discuss the current solutions for the problem of storage and management of medical images. Furthermore, we introduce a solution based on a private network of nodes that can overcome problems as privacy, redundancy and high availability. The developed system offers features that totally match with the Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) standard in terms of data integrity, immutability, and tolerance to failure. The results show that the proposed architecture performance are very similar with the baseline solutions. So, it reveals itself as a good solution considering the advantages pointed out.