In the last decade, medical institutions are facing the challenge of the storage and visualization of medical images collected by various medical equipment. In parallel, providing access to medical test datasets for certain scientific communities and medical institutions and at the same time ensuring protection of private data is important. DICOM Network project is developed for tackling such issues for different actors in the system based on various customized roles.
The project is based on a number of self-installed components that are built using a number of modules. Assembling of components and modules provides a flexible architecture of the DICOM “Network” that is consolidated by DICOM DATA Interface into one radiology tests database. The system architecture is presented in the diagram below:
The Project started from one node located in the Institute of Urgent Medicine (IMU) www.urgenta.md located in Chisinau, Moldova that served only one Institution and had storage element only of 2TB.
Thanks to the VI-SEEM project and RENAM computing infrastructure, the storage capabilities and processing power increases and now about 300 tests per day and 1TB of data per month is collected.
All this is possible by using a number of developed components: DICOM Server, DICOM Portal, DICOM Viewer, DICOM Audit and others that are flexible enough to cover the requirements of any medical institution or specific scientific community.
The current number of collected tests is over 187 000, that are regularly requested. A lot of medical institutions and different medical staff are working with this system. Two institutions refused using any other PACS and Archive system and are now using only DICOM Network for patient workflow.
Three DICOM Portals and four DICOM Servers are installed in two countries, namely Moldova and FYR of Macedonia. The clinic from Cluj-Napoca in Romania and Federal University named after M.V. Lomonosov in Russia expressed their interest to install DICOM Network.
Currently available DICOM Portals:
- http://dicom.md/ in IMU
- http://renam.dicom.md/ in RENAM
- http://viseem.dicom.md/ in Macedonia (VI-SEEM project).