New setup

    Hello,


    I am in the process of possibly migrating my old, unreliable PACS to the Conquest. I was hoping to get a little advice prior.


    I am a fairly low volume PET/CT imaging center. I have a Siemens Biograph Duo Classic. My volume is about 4-6 scans per day with an average number of stored images per study of 1023 (341 CT, 341 PET corrected, 341 PET uncorrected). Each study is about 200 MB. I have been operating for just over 2 years and I estimate that I have about 2.5 million images in my DICOM database. My current database is just over 400 GB. My files are stored on a server with Windows 2003 server, OS is loaded on a single hard drive with two 500 GB mirrored drives configured with RAID 5. I have 4 GB of RAM on the system. I have my RAID drives backed up to a 1.5 TB external drive. My plans are to replace the internal 500 GB drives with 1.5 TB drives in the near future.


    1. Based on my data, do you see any hardware issues?
    2. Based on my data, which database type would be most well suited.
    3. Does Conquest have the ability to migrate my prior data into its database via a file/folder search tool?
    4. My issues with my current PACS software (MyDicom FPACS) seem to stem from problems with the database size. Will I encounter similar problems with Conquest with a datase of this size?


    Any other advice you can give me on settup up and testing will be appreciated.'


    Thanks in advance.

    Hi,


    I believe conquest with MySQL would make a good setup. Your hardware sounds quite adequate. With MySQL and conquest the database tables will store in 0.4 GB / per million images. Your existing dicom files might be integrated without problem into conquest. Just set the data directory to the same folder and try a regenerate (that will take a few weeks to complete).


    As long as the database is fast (mysql is), there is no size limit. People have reported storing 10s of million images. We gave 20 million images in MsSQL. MySQL is better, I believe.


    Marcel

    Thanks for the reply. A few weeks to regenerate, wow, that's a long time.


    How would one do database management down the line? For example, the law requires us to maintain studies for 5 years. If I wanted to purge the patient files from my database that hadn't been seen in our clinic in over 5 years, is there a way to sort? If I had a patient that continued to visit our facility regularly, I would want to keep all of there studies until they hadn't visited in over 5 years.


    I know next to nothing about programming and have no experience with direct database management. I am a skilled software/hardware user. Is this something simple or would I need to seek further training or a skilled person to assist?

    Hi,


    you can use LRUSortOrder to make the system delete (when purging based on full disk) on the studydate: it should delete patients with the oldest latest studydate first. But typically, people do not delete at all, just add disk space.


    Marcel

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