A management system for a PACS network in a hospital environment

Abstract

The paper reports on a network management system for a Picture Archiving and Communication System (PACS) in a hospital environment. The size of a typical data transfer in this environment is several orders of magnitude larger than a typical data transfer in a local area computer network. To ensure reasonable response times to the system's users, it is necessary to sequentialise the image traffic on the PACS network. Knowledge about patient flow, radiologist flow, and image flow which is available in the hospital environment, can be exploited for careful planning and scheduling of network traffic. We designed and implemented a prototype of a network management system in which both the network configuration and the traffic management strategy are modeled explicitly. In combination with a discrete-event simulator a platform is realised which allows for experimentation with different hypothetical network configurations and/or different traffic management strategies. The current prototype is developed on a HP 9000 workstation using the knowledge representation system KEE.