Method, computer-readable medium, and system for storing, allocating and retrieving medical image data in a distributed computerized system of a clinical facility

Patent metadata

Field	Value
Publication number	US-9424324-B2
Application number	US-43765009-A
Country	US
Kind code	B2
Filing date	May 8, 2009
Priority date	May 8, 2008
Publication date	Aug 23, 2016
Grant date	Aug 23, 2016

Abstract

In a method for storing and providing medical image data in a distributed, computer-based system of a clinical facility comprising multiple satellites, wherein a satellite has at least one modality, an image administration server and at least one local database, and wherein the clinical facility also has a central database for the administration of the stored image data and a central long-term storage for long-term storage, the image data are acquired at the modality, the image data include metadata and pixel data, partial metadata in the metadata of the acquired image data are marked, at least the metadata of the image data acquired are locally stored at the respective satellites, the image data of the image data acquired at the respective satellites are centrally stored in the central long-term storage, all metadata stored in the local database in the central database are completely, centrally replicated, and the marked partial metadata of the image data from the central database are partially, automatically replicated at respective local databases of one, multiple or all satellites in order to be able to provide these image data at the satellites.

First claim

We claim as our invention:

1. A method for storing and providing medical image data in a distributed, computer-based system of a clinical facility comprising a plurality of satellites, wherein each satellite comprises at least one imaging modality, an image administration server, and a local database, and wherein said clinical facility further comprises a central database configured for administration of stored image data and a central long-term storage for long-term storage of said image data, comprising:
acquiring image data at an imaging modality of a satellite of the plurality of satellites, said image data comprising metadata and pixel data, wherein the metadata includes hierarchically arranged data elements that include a patient data element having information corresponding to a patient associated with the corresponding image data, a study or series data element that identifies a study or series associated with the corresponding image data, a modality data element having information about an imaging modality associated with the image data, and an image data element having pixel data information associated with the corresponding image data;
centrally storing, in said central long-term storage, the acquired image data and image data acquired at all other satellites of the plurality of satellites;
locally storing the metadata of the image data acquired at the satellite in the local database of the satellite;
in said central database, centrally replicating the metadata of the image data acquired at the satellite and metadata stored in the respective local databases of the other satellites of the plurality of satellites;
filtering the replicated metadata corresponding to the image data acquired at the satellite to remove one or more of the data elements of the replicated metadata corresponding to the image data acquired at the satellite to generate partial metadata that corresponds to the image data acquired at the satellite and includes a subset of the data elements of the corresponding replicated metadata, wherein the filtering the replicated metadata includes determining a hierarchy level of the hierarchically arranged data elements of the replicated metadata, and removing the one or more data elements from the replicated metadata up to the hierarchy level of the hierarchically arranged data elements; and
at the respective local databases of the other satellites of the plurality of satellites, acquiring and replicating, in a decentralized replication procedure, the partial metadata corresponding to the image data acquired at the satellite from the central database, and storing the replicated partial metadata in the respective local databases of the other satellites of the plurality of satellites.

2. A method as claimed in claim 1 , wherein said central database of said clinical facility is a first central database, and wherein said clinical facility comprises a second central database, and comprising additional replicating the data among said first and second central databases.

3. A method as claimed in claim 2 , comprising placing said second central database in communication with the plurality of satellites.

4. A method as claimed in claim 1 , wherein each of the plurality of satellites comprises a local short-term storage, and comprising storing the pixel data of the image data acquired at the satellite in the local short-term storage of the satellite.

5. A method as claimed in claim 1 , comprising storing the pixel data in a format enabling direct access to said pixel data.

6. A method as claimed in claim 1 , wherein the filtering the replicated metadata corresponding to the image data acquired at the satellite comprises:
marking one or more of the data elements of the replicated metadata corresponding to the image data acquired at the satellite based on the hierarchical arrangement of the data elements of the replicated metadata; and
removing the one or more marked data elements from the replicated metadata corresponding to the image data acquired at the satellite to generate the partial metadata that corresponds to the image data acquired at the satellite.

7. A method as claimed in claim 1 , comprising, at one or more of the other satellites of the plurality of satellites, determining the image data is not locally accessible from a respective local database of the one or more other satellites based on the storage of the replicated partial metadata corresponding to the image data acquired at the satellite in the respective local database of the one or more other satellites.

8. A method as claimed in claim 1 , comprising, at said imaging modality of said satellite of the plurality of satellites, providing an auxiliary module and augmenting functions of the local database for short-term storage if a short-term storage capacity of said local database has exceeded a predetermined limit.

9. A method as claimed in claim 1 , further comprising: designating one or more local databases of one or more of the plurality of satellites as a failover cluster and cross-loading image data from one or more other satellites of the plurality of satellites to said failover cluster, without said image data proceeding through said central long-term storage, when said central long-term storage is overloaded or otherwise unavailable.

10. A method as claimed in claim 1 , wherein the patient data element, the study or series data element, the modality data element, and the image data element are arranged from highest to lowest in the hierarchy, respectively.

11. A method as claimed in claim 1 , wherein the replicated partial metadata corresponding to the image data acquired at the satellite is indicative to the other satellites of the plurality of satellites that the image data associated with the replicated partial metadata was not locally acquired by corresponding imaging modalities of the other satellites of the plurality of satellites.

12. A non-transitory, computer-readable storage medium encoded with programming instructions for storing and providing medical image data in a distributed, computer-based system of a clinical facility comprising a plurality of satellites, wherein each satellite of the plurality of satellites comprises at least one imaging modality, an image administration server, and a local database, and wherein said clinical facility further comprises a central database configured for administration of stored image data and a central long-term storage for long-term storage of image data acquired at an imaging modality of at least one of the plurality of satellites, said image data comprising pixel data and metadata including data elements, said programming instructions causing processors in said system to:
locally store, in the local database of a satellite of the plurality of satellites at which the image data was acquired, metadata corresponding to the image data acquired at the satellite of the plurality of satellites;
in said central long-term storage, centrally store the image data acquired at the satellite and image data acquired at all other satellites of the plurality of satellites;
in said central database, centrally replicate the metadata of the image data acquired at the satellite and metadata stored in the respective local databases of the other satellites of the plurality of satellites;
filter the replicated metadata corresponding to the image data acquired at the satellite to remove one or more of the data elements of the replicated metadata corresponding to the image data acquired at the satellite to generate partial metadata that corresponds to the image data acquired at the satellite and includes a subset of the data elements of the corresponding replicated metada

Assignees

• Friese Thomas
• Haug Thomas
• Merk Stephan
• Rueger Wolfgang
• Scheidl Achim
• Senn Matthias
• Shetty Veerendra
• Siemens Ag
• Siemens Medical Solutions Usa Inc

Inventors

• Friese Thomas
• Haug Thomas
• Merk Stephan
• Rueger Wolfgang
• Scheidl Achim
• Senn Matthias
• Shetty Veerendra

Classifications

• G06F17/30575 Primary

  Physics · mapped topic

• G06F17/30578

  Physics · mapped topic

• G06F17/30265

  Physics · mapped topic

• G06F19/321

  Physics · mapped topic

• G16H30/40

  for processing medical images, e.g. editing · CPC title