Enterprise Imaging: The Next Frontier in Healthcare Technology–A Liturature Review

A review of the literature was performed to evaluate, review and discuss the imaging systems of picture archiving and communicationsystem (PACS), vendor neutral archive (VNAs) and enterprise imaging.MethodA search through the databases of PubMed, OvidMedline, Scopus and Embase was performed utilizing several keywords relevantto image storage in various combinations of “OR” and “AND”. Articles were carefully assessed according to inclusion and exclusioncriteria where only articles published in the last 10 years were obtained to collect recent information. Additionally, articlesfound from the reference sections of electronically sourced articles were also reviewed.ResultsThe review revealed that traditional PACS suffer from several limitations of data storage, migration and maintenance. VNAs improveupon this situation by allowing images from different departments to be shared easily and extend this ability to in betweenorganizations. Physical copies of images are no longer needed and applications such as teleradiology and mobile imaging are possible.Enterprise imaging attempts to provide a format that allows for organizations to govern the management of image sharingand storage between institutions using a set of 7 characteristics that define an efficient system.ConclusionImage storage technology has experienced several advancements in recent years. Traditional PACS imaging has allowed for imagecapture, viewing, storage and analysis but is unable to perform effective image sharing across institutions. VNAs have provided asystem to surpass this limitation by normalizing proprietary digital imaging and communications in medicine (DICOM) formatsused by PACS vendors. With the advent of new technology, enterprise imaging has been developed as a system that enables themanagement of multi-departmental and multi-institutional image sharing in one system.