Web-based medical image archive system

This paper presents a Web-based medical image archive system in three-tier, client-server architecture for the storage and retrieval of medical image data, as well as patient information and clinical data. The Web-based medical image archive system was designed to meet the need of the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke for a central image repository to address questions of stroke pathophysiology and imaging biomarkers in stroke clinical trials by analyzing images obtained from a large number of clinical trials conducted by government, academic and pharmaceutical industry researchers. In the database management-tier, we designed the image storage hierarchy to accommodate large binary image data files that the database software can access in parallel. In the middle-tier, a commercial Enterprise Java Bean server and secure Web server manages user access to the image database system. User-friendly Web-interfaces and applet tools are provided in the client-tier for easy access to the image archive system over the Internet. Benchmark test results show that our three-tier image archive system yields fast system response time for uploading, downloading, and querying the image database.