Development of private cloud storage for medical image research data

Medical imaging research deals with large, heterogeneous and fragmented amounts of medical images. Such challenges lead to the need for secure, federated and functional medical image storage within this research community. With limited IT professional and research fund, the community is better provided with an outsourcing arrangement. Cloud computing promises lower cost, high scalability and availability which can be a natural solution such problems in long-term medical image archive. This paper presents a private cloud storage design and prototype development within an organization to solve such issues. Leveraging on the ability of cloud computing is shown meet to the system requirements. The prototype is implemented on OwnCloud cloud storage framework. The complete functionality of OwnCloud made it an ideal platform to develop and deploy this kind of cloud-based system. OwnCloud can keep images in different file formats and share such images to other researchers in simple way.