Design, development, exploitation and assessment of a Cardiology Web PACS

Healthcare institutions are increasingly turning to digital medical imaging systems to promote better diagnosis and treatment of their patients. The implementation of the Picture Archiving and Communication System (PACS) clearly contributes to an increase in the productivity of health professionals. However, despite the amount of research that has been done in the past two decades, there are still several technological hurdles that hinder the wide adoption of PACS in the Web environment. In this paper, we present a Web-enabled PACS that through the inclusion of several DICOM services and compression methods promotes medical image availability and greater accessibility to users. (C) 2008 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.