Picture Archiving and Communications System (PACS) explained
PACS is the acronym for Picture Archiving and Communications System. A PACS solution acts as a central storage hub for all data received from DICOM compliant medical imaging devices within a given network. A PACS solution also acts as the central distribution gateway for delivering medical imaging studies to the appropriate user and workstation.
DICOM compliant medical imaging devices transmit patient image(s)/data in the DICOM format via the network to the PACS server. The server makes that data available to the correct personnel and network locations based on predetermined rules. Patient data is continuously backed-up to a redundant array of inexpensive hard drives.
The PACS responds instantly to a request from a user to retrieve patient information whether it is through a DICOM query or from that user's assigned work list. The requested data/study is served to the client computer and displayed using the PACS review software. The review software is capable of displaying the medical images in a number of useful ways (e.g. single plane images, multi plane reconstruct, cine and animation of stacked images) and allows the user to adjust image values to enhance diagnostic capabilities (e.g. window/level, zoom, pan, invert grayscale) as well as annotate the medical images.
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