An article I submitted to the Journal of Digital Imaging has been published electronically.
Told from the year 2018, it looks back at the market and technical forces that results in the deconstruction of PACS (and RIS) as we know it.
Check it out and let me know what you think.
Don K Dennison 
Hi Don —
Quite a timely and fascinating article. A neuro imaging research and software development group I lead at a lab in Boston Children’s is working hard at in fact developing some of the conceptual technologies you allude to in your article:
* Web-based tools for 3D viewing and interactive with DICOM data (http://www.slicedrop.com)
* A core WebGL imaging library for all sort of medical imaging formats (http://goxtk.com)
* A web “2.0” data workflow and analytics system for medical image collection, processing, and sharing (https://github.com/FNNDSC/chrisreloaded)
Although I’m not so sure that PACS itself will vanish — it’s possible that it too will adapt and become more web-agile itself, providing more sophisticated search and query functionality.
Be happy to chat more if you’re interested/have time.
Hi Rudolph,
Glad you enjoyed it. I had lots of fun writing it and I have been getting lots of great feedback on the paper.
I do acknowledge that PACS vendors may actually participate in the “re-invention” of PACS–they have the imaging expertise, after all–but, often is it difficult to lead an organization to create something that will make its current product obsolete. Many will hang on to outdated concepts hoping that the market shift to this new model is not sustained.
The tools you mention are certainly examples of how traditional abilities of PACS can be decomposed into discrete services. I believe that the new DICOMweb standards (as well as HL7 FHIR) will make secure discovery, access and transfer of data over the Internet much easier and will open the door for a whole new ecosystem of image and information processing services like these.
Don
[…] systems, like RIS). This mirrors many of the same predictions made in the article titled PACS 2018: An Autopsy, published in JDI […]
[…] to say what the future will hold – I’d check out Don Dennison’s article, entitled PACS 2018: An Autopsy, as a start. If one will eventually “win”, it surely won’t happen anytime soon. What […]