A PQRM-based PACS system for advanced medical services under grid environment

Abstract

Picture Archiving and Communications System (PACS) is widely used in hospitals to take medical images, to send to radiologists or doctors and to store into storage in a digital manner, that has brought high efficiency in a medical process. Recently, the PACS is required to evolve into a more sophisticated system that is able to communicate with other medical system like EMR or other PACS as well as HIS and RIS toward a Medical-Grid over enterprise PACS. The existing PACS has a limitation to extend itself because that it has been designed to use in a Local Area Network (LAN) of hospital and that DICOM, the standard used by PACS, doesn``t have any QoS for file-transmission or security functions for an open network. In this thesis, we discuss how to meet the emerging requirements of PACS by Grid technology; especially how to integrate distributed PACS system into a PACS federation with guaranteed QoS and reduced cost. To do that, we reviewed about the problems of existing PACS systems and the limitation of DICOM standard at first. Then, we propose a PACS system over Policy Quorum based Resource Management (PQRM) system, which manages the storage resources and computing resources in the Grid environment to provide satisfying services for user requirements from SLA. Finally, we handled several experiments to show the superiority of our novel system to existing PACS systems, and test the real situation medical scenario. Through the results of the tests, we can see that while PQRM-based PACS providing the capability for advanced medical services it guarantees the QoS in several aspects.