Creation of a Multi-vendor Image-Sharing Solution

Abstract

Transferring medical imaging studies from one institution to another is a common occurrence in today's medical practice. For the past two decades, radiology departments have relied on physical media (compact discs and digital video disks) and human couriers to accomplish image transfer. This mode of transfer is slow, prone to failure, and reliant on outdated technology. To address these shortcomings, multiple image-sharing vendors have created electronic, cloud-based solutions. While these solutions solve multiple problems, a new problem has been introduced: it is difficult to send or receive images across image-sharing platforms. In this work, we describe how we have developed a solution to share images across multiple vendor platforms.

Keywords: Enterprise imaging; Image sharing; Image transfer; Interoperability.