Data Overloading in Medical Imaging: Emerging Issues, Challenges and Opportunities in Efficient Data Management

Imaging techniques have gained tremendous popularity and pace in current trend of medical diagnostics. The key reason lies in the fact that such techniques extract clinical information with higher speed and accuracy compared to manual diagnosis by doctors. Moreover, the images serve as important records/evidences of diseases, hence the images are stored for the future use. However, among these advantages, there are growing issues with wide spread applications of imaging techniques. To be specific these issues are data (i) overloading, (ii) security/privacy, (iii) storage, (iv) transfer (especially, across institutes, regions, countries). In this paper we review the individual sources of medical image data. Based on this review, we discuss enabling technologies and present Computer-Aided Diagnosis (CAD) as well as data mining as coping strategies for the overwhelming amount of digital image data encountered in modern clinical work flows.