With all the recent hoopla around Cloud Infrastructure, I thought it would be worthwhile studying up on the subject, in order to learn how private and public Clouds might impact the adoption of Vendor-Neutral Archives. While the concept of remote storage has been around for some time, the new twist that makes the subject much more interesting is the use of web services (HTTP) to exchange data with the Cloud. Coincidentally, there has been an effort underway since early 2010 to develop a web services methodology for communicating (exchanging) medical image data between diagnostic workstations, PACS server, Vendor Neutral Archive, Intelligent Storage Solution, and freestanding UniViewer server. The proposed web services protocol for medical imaging is called Medical Imaging Network Transport (MINT). You can read more about MINT on their web site. It is being suggested that MINT would replace the use of DICOM as the traditional interface between these devices. The move from DICOM to web services is motivated by significant performance improvements (DICOM communications involves considerable overhead), as well as the opportunity to take full advantage of the rich meta data that must be included with the image data in a web services protocol. Rather than attempt to summarize my opinions on this subject in this blog, I invite you to read the recent white paper that EMC commissioned me to write on this subject. I think that you will find the subject somewhat stimulating.
