A DICOM document-oriented approach to PACS infrastructure.

The need for long-term storage requires the future migration of image data from a PACS to its successor system. This paper considers the cost of such migration It is proposed that storage of data as "documents" in DICOM Part 10 formats on industry-standard media could reduce the time and cost of data migration relative to on-line DICOM transfer. The relation to present efforts in developing document-oriented electronic patient records is discussed. DICOM Part 10 files are found to be a sufficient representation of image documents, but additional software tools will be needed to reach its full potential. There is a significant cost benefit of the document storage method, but it is one of many factors which must be balanced in the selection of a PACS.