DATA CLUSTERING AND OTHER ARCHIVE RETRIEVAL STRATEGIES FOR TELERADIOLOGY AND PICTURE ARCHIVING AND COMMUNICATION-SYSTEMS

A key advantage in the conversion from film-based to digital radiology is the possibility of a long-term on line electronic archival of pati ent studies. The popular approach based on optical disk jukeboxes for the long-term archive and magnetic disk storage for data caching is no t economically attractive because of the cost of both the jukebox and the medium. Strategies for extending the archival system design with a tape jukebox have been studied. The proposed strategy calls for the u se of high-ratio lossy compression together with low-cost tape storage to make long-term on line archiving more affordable. An intelligent p refetching algorithm based on hospital information system and radiolog ic information system triggers, which in turn are augmented by manual case preparation, can effectively overcome the longer latency of ad ho c retrievals. This longer latency is caused by both system-level bottl enecks and the sequential access constraint of the tape drive. Strateg ies for image clustering and tape allocation by patient classification also enhance retrieval efficiency. This archival design using image c ompression, prefetching, and clustering could be implemented in many o f the existing teleradiology and picture archiving and communication s ystems. (C) 1995 by W.B. Saunders Company