Case Study -
Multi-Format Distributed Medical Imaging Storage
The Opportunity
A regional hospital needs to store very large numbers of variously formatted medical images, each associated with a particular patient and one or more research projects. The hospital needs to automatically convert a subset of the images into a common format at multiple resolutions for viewing at remote locations, on mobile systems, and for printing.
The hospital also needs to protect and manage those files including: encrypting them, implementing HIPPA policies, controlling retention, migrating rarely used files to less expensive storage systems, and so on. Lastly, the hospital wants to move from having many isolated storage silos to a single, federated storage system across two dozen campuses and assure that files will be stored and/or migrated to the locations nearest the heaviest users.
All this must occur while serving patients without interruption or even temporary data loss.
The Twisted Storage Solution
The policy-driven workflow feature in Twisted Storage can automatically convert each image to one or more formats using provided or user-developed developed plug-ins. It can perform any particular set of transcodings based on a wide range of parameters such as the incoming image format, file size, patient or project designation, and so on. The policy can also govern how many copies are made, what media each is stored on, and where they are located geographically.
The hospitals numerous storage silos can be aggregated into a single system where all files are indexed at ingestion and thus become globally searchable. Each storage sub-system within the Twisted Storage system scales independently of the other parts of the total system and security can be integrated with the hospital's existing access control system.