An automation framework for PACS workflows optimization in shared environments

The usage paradigm of PACS (Picture Archive and Communications Systems) has been suffering significant alterations throughout the years. Recently, pushed by new services related to Cloud and Web technologies, the usage of PACS in geographically distributed medical environments has promised significant productivity gains as well as increased quality medical services. However, the usage of PACS to support radiology workflows, previously local to institutions, in remote environments still raises great technological and technical challenges to PACS administrators. The following article describes the most common workflows associated with the radiology service and proposes a computer method for their optimization. The proposed method provides an automatic framework for scheduling and performing repetitive tasks without human interaction. Moreover, it was designed to optimize the workflows associated with distributed PACS scenarios by enabling prefetching rules to be applied to medical image studies. The idea is to leverage multiple indicators associated with the radiology workflows in order to predict whether a given study is likely to be requested, and anticipate it's transference procedure so that the study is already available when requested.