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. 2012 Oct;22(4):242-5.
doi: 10.4103/0971-3026.111468.

Vendor neutral archive in PACS

Tapesh Kumar Agarwal  1 , Sanjeev
Affiliations

Vendor neutral archive in PACS

Tapesh Kumar Agarwal et al. Indian J Radiol Imaging. 2012 Oct.

Abstract

An archive is a location containing a collection of records, documents, or other materials of historical importance. An integral part of Picture Archiving and Communication System (PACS) is archiving. When a hospital needs to migrate a PACS vendor, the complete earlier data need to be migrated in the format of the newly procured PACS. It is both time and money consuming. To address this issue, the new concept of vendor neutral archive (VNA) has emerged. A VNA simply decouples the PACS and workstations at the archival layer. This is achieved by developing an application engine that receives, integrates, and transmits the data using the different syntax of a Digital Imaging and Communication in Medicine (DICOM) format. Transferring the data belonging to the old PACS to a new one is performed by a process called migration of data. In VNA, a number of different data migration techniques are available to facilitate transfer from the old PACS to the new one, the choice depending on the speed of migration and the importance of data. The techniques include simple DICOM migration, prefetch-based DICOM migration, medium migration, and the expensive non-DICOM migration. "Vendor neutral" may not be a suitable term, and "architecture neutral," "PACS neutral," "content neutral," or "third-party neutral" are probably better and preferred terms. Notwithstanding this, the VNA acronym has come to stay in both the medical IT user terminology and in vendor nomenclature, and radiologists need to be aware of its impact in PACS across the globe.

Keywords: Archive; DICOM; PACS; PACS neutral; PACS vendor; VNA; architecture neutral; archival layer; content neutral; data migration; non-DICOM migration; patient data; third-party neutral; vendor neutral archive; workstations.

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Conflict of interest statement

Conflict of Interest: None declared.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Vendor neutral archive (VNA) is stationed between the modality and PACS. The imaging data is pushed to VNA directly from the modality. Thereafter, VNA forwards it to PACS, along with the priors. VNA stores the image presentation states and key image in DICOM format
Figure 2
Figure 2
Vendor neutral archive can work as enterprise archive for all departments like radiology and cardiology, seamlessly integrating their data
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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