Digital Preservation in Radiology

briefing paper The rapid technological changes in today's information landscape have considerably turned the preservation of digital information into a pressing challenge. Be it digital images, documents, audio or video files, all require particular attendance when it comes to preserving them for long periods of time. Without appropriate measures, digital objects will be inaccessible in a very short time. A lot of different strategies often depending on the application area have been proposed to tackle this challenge. In medical imaging

considerably large digital objects are produced, processed and archived in a networked environment where parts of the collection also have to be made accessible at short notice. In many European countries hospitals, radiologists and private clinics have the legal obligation to archive data for 30 years. Different standards for communication and storage exist in radiology including DICOM and HL7 to accomplish these high demands. However, additional efforts may be required to establish trusted repositories by utilizing risk assessment and compliance auditing for the respective archival systems. Introduction Systems managing patient information in general and medical images in particular have to meet high demands, from the medical point of view. Such systems must guarantee the accessibility of their stored information for very long periods of time due to strict legal obligations. In many countries radiographic images must be retained for 7 years, and 30 years respectively if they are relevant for diagnosis. In medical imaging, devices for storage and presentation of images are called PACS (Picture Archiving and Communication Systems); they communicate according to specific protocols and store data in an independent format. The most common format used for storing, handling, transmitting and printing is DICOM (Digital Imaging and COmmunications in...

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