Modular Development of a Hospital Wide Picture Archiving and Communication System (PACS)

Abstract

The PACS under development at the University Hospital of Geneva is a hospital-wide Image Management System for radiological as well as non-radiological medical images which is part of a one of the widest hospital information systems (HIS) in Switzerland (Diogene system). It is based on a multi-vendor open architecture and a set of widely available industry standards, namely: Unix as the operating system, TCP-IP as network protocol and an SQL-based distributed database (INGRES) that handles both the PACS and the HIS. The PACS is based on a distributed architecture of servers of two types: the Archive Servers connected to the sources of images and equipped with large optical disk libraries (Juke Boxes) and Display Servers distributed over the hospital. A standard image storage format was developed based on the ACR-NEMA standard. This file format called the PAPYRUS format, allows to store sets of images as a sequence of ACR-NEMA messages in an “encapsulated” file structure. In order to provide a more uniform user interface on a variety of different workstations a common platform for image display and manipulation called OSIRIS is developed based on X-11 windowing system and OSF/Motif extension. Such a platform is designed to be portable to any computer running Unix and equipped with a graphic display system running X-11. Also because this software is written in the object oriented language C++, it is easily expandable and easily adaptable to different needs and requirements.