Simulation of a pacs in a hospital environment!

Abstract

This paper presents a simulation of a distributed imaging system used for storing and retrieving digitally formatted medical images. The simulation model includes a one segment Ethernet local area network (LAN) as its communication system. This segment connects three image input devices, an image processor, an active storage device, an archival storage device, and one or more display devices (workstations). The simulated model is driven by a medical imaging workload similar to a hospital radiology department, and consists of a mix of user activities such as display, edit, manipulate and browse. These operations are performed interactively at a work-station. Performance measures such as response times, channel utilization and number of collisions were tabulated and are presented in graphs for different numbers of workstations connected to a system with different channel capacities and different image sizes. Conclusions are drawn with regard to necessary channel capacity and the viability of Ethernet for PACS. © 1986 SPIE.