The picture archiving system of Galilei has to main aspects. One aspects is that you administrate and easily expand storage capacities by using standard components like a Linux machine and network attached storage systems. The other aspect is, that the archiving system can be integrated seamlessly into the business process of GCRS and still stays a completely open system.

How would I initiate an archiving process ?

The archiving process is initiated by placing an order of services, which carry as parameters those aspects which you want to document. These services ill appear on the order list of the offering screen like any other service. When the user assigns certain services of the order list to the work list , a directory structure which carries the name of the work list and subdirectories corresponding to the medical parameters will be created on the device where the images will be stored at the first time. This directory structure can be compared to a pre structured filmstrip which already carries all necessary information to build links in the database which point to the images in the image archive.

Why did you implement this so called filmstrip as a directory structure and not directly in the database ?

The main reason was the requirement that the images should be freely accessible on the level of the operating system by either other users or user groups who have very specific user rights. Secondly we needed the flexibility to use any imaging device like digital cameras, scanner, video camera up to computer tomography to store pictures without the need of complicated interfacing. Which would have been the case if we had used a database. Thirdly we have to process those images by compressing them, sending them with email, publishing the through the web and accessing them with other systems. Here we wanted to allow the user a maximum of freedom only restricted by his user rights which regulated in the operating system.

Is it possible to create images independently of a permanent database access ?

In order to generate the archive structure you need to create a filmstrip directory. This can be created very fast and efficiently using the order management module of GCRS. This filmstrip directory can be created on virtually every device which can be mapped to the GRCS e.g. through drive mapping of an ICA-Client. You can also create this film strip structure manually but it is a very tedious work. The images you can take with out any database connection with you imaging device. You either create the image directly in the filmstrip structure or you move the images into the filmstrip later.

How will the images to the image archiving server ?

The full or have full filmstrip will be dragged and dropped into a Hot folder. This Hot folder will compress the filmstrip and will transfer it via https to archiving server. On the archiving server programs to create thumbnails and display images and to move the original images into the archive and to write the links pointing to the archive into the database.