A Parallel Architecture Using HDF for Storing DICOM Medical Images on Distributed File Systems

The Hierarchical Data Format (HDF) is an interesting approach for developing scientific applications where a large amount of data must be stored and accessed. A telemedicine project underway in the State of Santa Catarina (SC), in Brazil, has developed a server called the CyclopsDCMServer, which adopts the HDF for the manipulation of medical images (DICOM). This paper proposes a new approach for the parallel implementation of I/O operations for the medical images stored on this server. This effort was based upon the MPI paradigm that is supported by the version 5 of the HDF. Early experiments indicate that the proposed approach can achieve very good performance when compared to the standard HDF implemented in the CyclopsDCM-Server. Keywords-Parallel I/O; HDF5; DICOM; Telemedicine; PVFS; MPI;