Scalable storage architecture for the archiving of medical images and information

Storage and archive systems are essential components of a Picture Archiving and Communication System (PACS) and become increasingly important in medical enterprise-wide information systems. Building a large-scale, long-term medical data storage system is complex, involving accurate identification of system requirements, judicious tradeoff between flexibility and complexity and effective execution of implementation plans. The proposed object-oriented software architecture fulfills the key system requirements, while maintains a high degree of flexibility for extending and customizing the framework in various medical data archive application areas. The complexity in developing such a framework has been proven manageable with various prototypes.