Towards a More Cloud-friendly Medical Imaging Applications Architecture: a Modest Proposal

Recent information technology literature, in general, and radiology trade journals, in particular, are rife with allusions to the "cloud" suggesting that moving one's compute and storage assets into someone else's data center magically solves cost, performance, and elasticity problems. More likely, one is only trading one set of problems for another, including greater latency (aka slower turnaround times) since the image data must now leave the local area network and travel longer paths via encrypted tunnels. To offset this, an imaging system design is needed that reduces the number of high-latency image transmissions, yet can still leverage cloud strengths. This work explores the requirements for such a design.