Operational radiologic image archive on digital optical disks.

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.