Medical Modality Archives with rasdaman

Hospitals, clinics, and other medical establishments increasingly recognize the importance of patient records with its high potential for efficiency augmentation, transparence and cost savings. Unfortunately, maintenance of these huge amounts of data of various modalities becomes the bottle neck of user friendly systems. Content-based retrieval with ECGs, x-ray, ultrasound, CT or MRI images is almost not supported by today's systems.

Figure: Different Modalities

The radiological department of a filmless hospital produces about 3,1 MB of data per bed and day which emphasizes the requirement for a powerful and cost-efficient picture archiving and communication system (PACS).

One of the key advantages of the innovative rasdaman technology is the uniform archival of digital data independent of its origin, dimensionality, and size. The query language allows to formulate arbitrary search criterions based on data contents and location. Intelligent query optimization together with special storage strategies grant for efficient access of the data.

In contrast to the frequently used approach of intelligent clients communicating with pure archive servers, rasdaman follows the philosophy what you need is what you get. A strong server directly operates close to the data and sends the refined query results to the clients. This way, network traffic as well as client hardware requirements are reduced which substantially saves costs. Further, this technique is predestined for its application in the low speed Internet.

Examples. The consulting physician promptly needs a saggital CT recording of a specific brain area which is available in the radiology department. The rasdaman server performs the necessary computations of the required section and sends the minimal amount of data necessary to fulfill the query to the workstation.

Now besides the CT image, the most recent ECG recording of the patient is needed without being forced to change the workplace or the application. This is self-evident for rasdaman, as data is maintained independently of its dimensionality and origin.

Within the scope of a radiological case study, CT recordings with extremely high intensity values in a certain geometric area are of special interest. rasdaman identifies exactly these recording for you. The search is performed directly within the database which enables rasdaman for its unmatched performance.

Use rasdaman to add all dimensions to your patient records!