Viability of the ACR-NEMA standard for medical image communications

摘要

The ACR-NEMA standard (1985), allows different medical devices to communicate compatibly in a Picture Archiving and Communication System (PACS) environment. In this paper, we report results from an extensive and detailed simulation study for evaluating the performance of PACS which operate with the ACR-NEMA standard. It is shown that the ACR-NEMA standard in its present form may not be suited for future PACS as it results in excessive response-times values for image-viewing requests. We propose a number of protocol and architecture enhancements to the ACR-NEMA standard and demonstrate that these proposed enhancements reduce the ACR-NEMA standard overhead significantly, allowing the transmission of larger and more frequent images.