Services Orchestration and Workflow Management in Distributed Medical Imaging Environments

Medical imaging laboratories are supported by information and communication systems commonly denominated as PACS, that encompasses technology for acquisition, archive, distribution and visualization of digital images in network. Concerning the data and workflow management, traditional solutions used in production provide a limited set of services usually configured at system installation. As result, healthcare institutions are not able to fully explore their infrastructure or adapt it to new operational requirements, either for clinical or research procedures. This article proposes a framework for services orchestration and workflow management in distributed medical imaging environments. It was designed for end-user usage and is accessible through a Web portal that allows to document, repeat and allocate procedures and tasks to correct resources, either from information systems or human interventions. It provides an abstraction layer for integration with distinct data sources through standard services, allows the creation of new services through orchestration of existent ones and the scheduling of tasks. Moreover, it includes a logging and alert mechanism integrated with email service. The solution was validated through the specification of two use cases that were deployed in production environment.