new/old computers in radiology (Long)

From: McFadden, Mike <mmcfadden_at_cmh.edu>
Date: Wed Mar 7 09:07:46 2001

One of the Radiologist's I work with asked me the following question.

Which computer would you buy if you were only going to do file transfers and
archiving? I answered a VAX/Alpha running VMS since there were no known
viruses and that system security was good. My answer was predicated on the
fact that he needed storage for medical images and that he needed to
maintain complete medical confidentiality. He is totally frustrated with
the lack of reliability on Windows NT and is favoring SUN based systems.
The trend in radiology is to move toward Windows NT platforms because the
companies can't get support staff that can handle anything else. Our
biggest problem, since we are a children's hospital is that we must maintain
the data for 25 years. Actually 7 years once the child turns 18. In
practice we plan never to get rid of any data.

Examples of systems in Radiology

CT scanner using SGI computer
CT workstation using SUN running Solaris
Vitrea 3D workstation using Windows NT on HP Kayak computer
Laser film printer network running MS-DOS
Laser film printer network running LINUX
MRI scanner using SUN
Film digitizer running on PC using Windows NT
Nuclear medicine system with Windows NT, Mac G4, and Linux on PC
VME systems embedded in film printers

I have 8" floppies from old CT scanners, QIC tapes, DAT tapes, MO disks, 5
1/4 floppies, 3 1/2 floppies, 9 track tapes

I was offered from a major US company a radiology image management system
the other day that had the following systems.
Windows NT display stations
Apple Macintosh image archive server
Sun webserver and image server
I don't think anybody could support and troubleshoot such a system. Their
answer is that they support the system today and will provide an upgrade
path when they change every 3-4 years.

woe-is-me
Mike
mmcfadden_at_cmh.edu
Received on Wed Mar 07 2001 - 09:07:46 GMT