Radiology, Vol 167, 139-142, Copyright © 1988 by Radiological Society of North America
Operational radiologic image archive on digital optical disks
NJ Mankovich, RK Taira, PS Cho and HK Huang
Department of Radiological Sciences, University of California, Los Angeles 90024.
A digital optical disk archive for storage of computed radiographic,
computed tomographic, magnetic resonance, ultrasonographic, and digitized
film radiographic images was installed. In the system, digital images enter
a minicomputer, are temporarily stored on magnetic disks, and are archived
onto write-once read-many optical disks at their full resolution. A
pictorial index of minified images is maintained for each patient. After 8
months of operation, 49,400 megabytes of images had been retained on 19
optical disks stored, after January 1987, in a mechanical jukebox-style
optical disk library. The success rate for archival capture of images
during the initial period was 96.6%. The failures were due to overfilling
of the magnetic disk, a problem addressed through the addition of a second
magnetic disk unit. There were no medium-related image errors during the
early period. Problems resulting from the slow speed of optical disk
systems were addressed operationally by initiating recall of a patient's
archived images from the optical to the faster magnetic disk as soon as the
system received a request to acquire a new image. Also, optical disk
retrieval times are expected to improve with technologic development.
