Medical imaging archiving: A comparison between several NoSQL solutions

The use of digital medical imaging systems has greatly increased in healthcare institutions and they are currently valuable tools supporting medical decision and treatment procedures. The proliferation of digital modalities led to an explosion on medical images production, increasing the need to have larger repositories to afford all this amount of data with high availability and performance. NoSQL databases have been replacing relational databases in some scenarios, due to their horizontal scalability and to their flexibility to adapt to dynamic requirements. In this paper, we present an implementation of a medical imaging archive supported in both MongoDB and CouchDB. This implementation is compliant with the medical imaging standards and the storage and query/retrieve performance of our different implementations were evaluated. We also discuss the strengths and weakness of the proposed implementations and present several scenarios that take advantage of the proposed solutions.