Shipping DICOM data between two or many WAN-connected PACS archives is often a burden on infrastructure resources (bandwidth, switches, routers, etc). A customer requested we install three separate PACS and have each system write data to the other creating a multi-site mesh-configured archival solution. While at the surface this makes sense, the resources required to execute this solution are in excess of what is necessary. An additional challenge on top of this is working with the DICOM c-store communication method which is inherently inefficient over WAN connected archives. With DICOM, each individual medical image that is archived and stored is individually transmitted from the origin to the destination. Erroneous TCP data encapsulates each communication compounding the amount of bandwidth needed for each communication to occur.
A solution we are now implementing to intelligently archive the medical imaging data produced during a given day is to package it and distribute it to the remote sites using SFTP at the end of business. Efficiency is increased by a immeasureable magnitude by transporting a single data stream vs. many thousand streams (each individual image). Once the package arrives at the destination a script extracts that data, parses it and uses DICOM’s c-store method to submit it to the local archive. As well, an E-mail is sent to the PACS administrator notifying him/her of the success or failure of the transmission.
