Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

An Intelligent Cloud Storage Gateway for Medical Imaging

  • Systems-Level Quality Improvement
  • Published:
Journal of Medical Systems Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Historically, medical imaging repositories have been supported by indoor infrastructures. However, the amount of diagnostic imaging procedures has continuously increased over the last decades, imposing several challenges associated with the storage volume, data redundancy and availability. Cloud platforms are focused on delivering hardware and software services over the Internet, becoming an appealing solution for repository outsourcing. Although this option may bring financial and technological benefits, it also presents new challenges. In medical imaging scenarios, communication latency is a critical issue that still hinders the adoption of this paradigm. This paper proposes an intelligent Cloud storage gateway that optimizes data access times. This is achieved through a new cache architecture that combines static rules and pattern recognition for eviction and prefetching. The evaluation results, obtained from experiments over a real-world dataset, show that cache hit ratios can reach around 80%, leading to reductions of image retrieval times by over 60%. The combined use of eviction and prefetching policies proposed can significantly reduce communication latency, even when using a small cache in comparison to the total size of the repository. Apart from the performance gains, the proposed system is capable of adjusting to specific workflows of different institutions.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Fig. 1
Fig. 2
Fig. 3
Fig. 4
Fig. 5
Fig. 6

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  1. Beutel, J., Sonka, M., and Michael Fitzpatrick, J., Handbook of medical imaging, volume 2 medical image processing and analysis 2000.

  2. Huang, H., PACS and imaging informatics: basic principles and applications. Wiley, 2011.

  3. Top, M., Physicians’ views and assessments on picture archiving and communication systems (pacs) in two turkish public hospitals. J. Med. Syst. 36(6):3555–3562, 2012.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  4. Benjamin, M., Aradi, Y., and Shreiber, R., From shared data to sharing workflow: Merging pacs and teleradiology. Eur. J. Radiol. 73(1):3–9, 2010.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  5. Weng, S.-J., Gotcher, D., Wu, H.-H., Xu, Y.-Y., Yang, C.-W., and Lai, L.-S., Cloud image data center for healthcare network in Taiwan. J. Med. Syst. 40(4):89, 2016.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  6. Silva, L. A. B., Costa, C., and Oliveira, J. L., A pacs archive architecture supported on cloud services. Int. J. Comput. Assist. Radiol. Surg. 7(3):349–358, 2012.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  7. Philbin, J., Prior, F., and Nagy, P.: Will the next generation of pacs be sitting on a cloud? J. Digit. Imaging 24(2):179–183, 2011.

  8. Shoaib, M., Ahmad, U., and Al-Amri, A., Multimedia framework to support ehealth applications. Multimedia Tools and Applications 73:2081–2101, Dec 2014.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  9. Bui, A. A., McNitt-Gray, M. F., Goldin, J. G., Cardenas, A. F., and Aberle, D. R., Problem-oriented prefetching for an integrated clinical imaging workstation. J. Am. Med. Inform. Assoc. 8(3):242–253, 2001.

    Article  CAS  PubMed  PubMed Central  Google Scholar 

  10. Meyer-Ebrecht, D., Picture archiving and communication systems (pacs) for medical application. Int. J. Bio-Med. Comput. 35(2):91–124, 1994.

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  11. NEMA: Digital imaging and communications in medicine (DICOM), 2016.

  12. NEMA: Digital imaging and communications in medicine (DICOM) part 3 : Information object definitions, 2016.

  13. NEMA: Digital imaging and communications in medicine (DICOM) part 4 : Service class specifications, 2016.

  14. NEMA: Digital imaging and communications in medicine (DICOM) part 8: Network communication support for message exchange, 2016.

  15. Silva, L. A. B., Costa, C., and Oliveira, J. L., An agile framework to support distributed medical imaging scenarios. In: Healthcare Informatics (ICHI), 2013 IEEE International Conference on, pp. 345–350, IEEE, 2013.

  16. Silva, L. A. B., Pinho, R., Ribeiro, L. S., Costa, C., and Oliveira, J. L., A centralized platform for geo-distributed pacs management. J. Digit. Imaging 27(2):165–173, 2014.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  17. Smith, A. J., Cache memories. ACM Comput. Surv. (CSUR) 14(3):473–530, 1982.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  18. Bick, U., and Lenzen, H., Pacs: the silent revolution. Eur. Radiol. 9(6):1152–1160, 1999.

    Article  CAS  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  19. Pal, M. B., and Jain, D. C., An approach for web pre-fetching to enhance user interaction of web application using markov model. In: Communication Systems and Network Technologies (CSNT) Fourth International Conference on, pp. 373–377, IEEE, 2014.

  20. García, R., Verdú, E., Regueras, L. M., De Castro, J. P., and Verdú, M. J., A neural network based intelligent system for tile prefetching in web map services. Expert Syst. Appl. 40(10):4096–4105, 2013.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  21. Ali, W., Shamsuddin, S. M., and Ismail, A. S., Intelligent web proxy caching approaches based on machine learning techniques. Decis. Support. Syst. 53(3):565–579, 2012.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  22. Viana-Ferreira, C., Ribeiro, L., Matos, S., and Costa, C., Pattern recognition for cache management in distributed medical imaging environments. Int. J. Comput. Assist. Radiol. Surg. 11(2):327–336, 2016.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  23. Garetto, M., Leonardi, E., and Martina, V., A unified approach to the performance analysis of caching systems. ACM Trans. Model. Perform. Evaluation Comp. Syst. 1(3):12, 2016.

    Google Scholar 

  24. Wirth, S., Treitl, M., Mueller-Lisse, U.-G., Rieger, J., Mittermaier, I., Pfeifer, K.-J., and Reiser, M., Hard disk online caches in picture archiving and communication systems archives: how big is beautiful?. Eur. Radiol. 16(8):1847–1853, 2006.

    Article  PubMed  Google Scholar 

  25. Beutel, J., Kundel, H. L., and Van Metter, R. L.: Handbook of medical imaging volume 1: Physics and psychophysics, 2000.

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Departamento de Electronica Telecomunicacoes e Informatica Aveiro, Universidade de Aveiro, Aveiro, Portugal

    Carlos Viana-Ferreira, António Guerra, João F. Silva, Sérgio Matos & Carlos Costa

Authors
  1. Carlos Viana-Ferreira
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. António Guerra
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. João F. Silva
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  4. Sérgio Matos
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  5. Carlos Costa
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to António Guerra.

Ethics declarations

Conflict of interests

All authors declare that there are no conflicts of interest in this work.

Ethical Approval

This article does not contain any studies with human participants or animals performed by any of the authors.

Funding

This work has received support from the ERDF European Regional Development Fund through the Operational Programme for Competitiveness and Internationalisation - COMPETE 2020 Programme, and by National Funds through the FCT - Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia within project PTDC/EEI-ESS/6815/2014; POCI-01-0145-FEDER-016694. Sérgio Matos is funded under the FCT Investigator programme.

Additional information

This article is part of the Topical Collection on Systems-Level Quality Improvement

Electronic supplementary material

Below is the link to the electronic supplementary material.

(30.8 KB)

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Viana-Ferreira, C., Guerra, A., Silva, J. et al. An Intelligent Cloud Storage Gateway for Medical Imaging. J Med Syst 41, 141 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10916-017-0790-8

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10916-017-0790-8

Keywords

Search

Navigation