title: Operational radiologic image archive on digital optical disks.
abstract: 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.
authors.affiliation: Department of Radiological Sciences, University of California, Los Angeles 90024.
authors.forename: N J
authors.initials: NJ
authors.lastname: Mankovich
authors.forename: R K
authors.initials: RK
authors.lastname: Taira
authors.forename: P S
authors.initials: PS
authors.lastname: Cho
authors.forename: H K
authors.initials: HK
authors.lastname: Huang
mesh_terms: D001330:Electronic Data Processing; D006751:Hospital Information Systems; D006801:Humans; D008905:Minicomputers; D011856:Radiographic Image Enhancement; D011873:Radiology Information Systems