VIABILITY OF THE ACR-NEMA STANDARD FOR MEDICAL IMAGE COMMUNICATIONS

The ACR-NEMA standard (1985), allows different medical devices to comm unicate compatibly in a Picture Archiving and Communication System (PA CS) environment. In this paper, we report results from an extensive an d detailed simulation study for evaluating the performance of PACS whi ch operate with the ACR-NEMA standard. It is shown that the ACR-NEMA s tandard in its present form may not be suited for future PACS as it re sults in excessive response-times values for image-viewing requests. W e propose a number of protocol and architecture enhancements to the AC R-NEMA standard and demonstrate that these proposed enhancements reduc e the ACR-NEMA standard overhead significantly, allowing the transmiss ion of larger and more frequent images.