Concept and initial experience with a mid-term DICOM archiving system acting as an intelligent buffer to clinical requests

Digital DICOM data storage is now a standard for coronary angiography. Based on the experience that more than 90% of cardiological image requests are within the first year, we developed the concept of a lean and cost-effective DICOM archiving system consisting of: (1) instantaneous hard-disk access to the full image sets within one year with intelligent reloading according to the clinical needs; (2) hospital-wide access to the full image sequences; and (3) long-term archiving of data on CD-R as the most cost-effective, single-procedure medium. The system consists of 3 NT-servers and a 500 GB hard-disk RAID5 system. Three catheterization laboratories and 14 clients are connected via a 100 MBit LAN. Archive management is done by a SQL database (Centura) connected to the hospital information system (SAP ISH). Local clients include a database front-end and a DICOM viewer (Quazar). The system is sized for 2500 interventions per year and can easily be re-scaled.