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CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 · Indian J Radiol Imaging 2012; 22(04): 242-245
DOI: 10.4103/0971-3026.111468
ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Vendor neutral archive in PACS

Tapesh Kumar Agarwal
Meddiff Technologies Pvt. Ltd., Bangalore
,
Sanjeev › Author Affiliations Source of Support: Nill.
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Abstract

An archive is a location containing a collection of records, documents, or other materials of historical importance. An integral part of Picture Archiving and Communication System (PACS) is archiving. When a hospital needs to migrate a PACS vendor, the complete earlier data need to be migrated in the format of the newly procured PACS. It is both time and money consuming. To address this issue, the new concept of vendor neutral archive (VNA) has emerged. A VNA simply decouples the PACS and workstations at the archival layer. This is achieved by developing an application engine that receives, integrates, and transmits the data using the different syntax of a Digital Imaging and Communication in Medicine (DICOM) format. Transferring the data belonging to the old PACS to a new one is performed by a process called migration of data. In VNA, a number of different data migration techniques are available to facilitate transfer from the old PACS to the new one, the choice depending on the speed of migration and the importance of data. The techniques include simple DICOM migration, prefetch-based DICOM migration, medium migration, and the expensive non-DICOM migration. "Vendor neutral" may not be a suitable term, and "architecture neutral," "PACS neutral," "content neutral," or "third-party neutral" are probably better and preferred terms. Notwithstanding this, the VNA acronym has come to stay in both the medical IT user terminology and in vendor nomenclature, and radiologists need to be aware of its impact in PACS across the globe.

Keywords

Archive - content neutral - architecture neutral - archival layer - data migration - DICOM - non-DICOM migration - PACS - PACS neutral - PACS vendor - patient data - third-party neutral - vendor neutral archive - VNA - workstations


Publication History

Article published online:
04 October 2021

© 2012. Indian Radiological Association. This is an open access article published by Thieme under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonDerivative-NonCommercial-License, permitting copying and reproduction so long as the original work is given appropriate credit. Contents may not be used for commercial purposes, or adapted, remixed, transformed or built upon. (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).

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