A PACS Gateway to the Cloud

The amount of medical images has increased significantly over the last decade as result of the increase of number and quality of studies. Following some researchers, this trend will continue over the next years. Cloud computing is a new concept based on a well-know model named “pay-as-you-go”. There is a new concept dubbed PACS Cloud, which the fundamental idea is to do PACS outsourcing taking advantages of the clouds elasticity and scalability, avoiding hardware obsolescence, providing universal access to the information anywhere, anytime and increase the data availability. This paper presents a module of PACS Cloud architecture to grant interoperability with DICOM devices. PACS Cloud Gateway is a component of PACS Cloud, which focuses mainly on the translation from DICOM commands to non-DICOM and vice-versa. While data outsource to the cloud can relieve users from the burden of local storage and maintenance, it also brings new security concerns. This paper presents a secure PACS Cloud Gateway to access PACS Cloud archive, which provides a high security level and without cloud´s provider dependence. The workflows of each process was described carefully, specifying data flows since that Gateway is contacted by DICOM device, until it releases the process. Finally, the platform was instantiated in biggest Internet Cloud providers and the solution´s results was analysed.