Engineering and clinical oriented solution to cost-effective PACS for developing areas in China

Although PACS has been studied in industrial countries for more than sixteen years, few effort has been made so far to apply PACS technology to such developing areas as most rural regions in China. Engineering and clinical problems raised from installing PACS in undeveloped areas has brought many challenges to our system design. In this study, we try to analyze the clinical need of the Chinese hospitals and fmd out a solution to meet most hospitals' requirements from engineering and clinical points of view, such as system cost, ease ol: deployment, user interface, maintenance difficulty, etc, thus provide patients with better medical service al affordable cost. First of all, we analyzed data collected from Zhejiang Cancer Hospital (ZCH) and take hospitals' financial situation into consideration. Then according to the, analysis, we made our choices for hardware and software platform, digitizer and storage device. The development of mini PACS is interacted, by clinicians and radiologists from Zhejiang Cancer Hospital. They showed great interest In the downsizing PACS that does not risk much of the system performance, It is promising that our solution will be accepted In developing areas.