PACS VM Specifications

This document details the specifications for a virtual machine needed by the Photon system to process PACS images into our cloud.

Objective

Establish guidelines for hospitals when creating virtual machines inside their own network to handle the image processing necessary for Photon integration.

Purpose

The Photon platform requires pre-processing of DICOM files into JPEGs. This is done to significantly reduce the bandwidth necessary for sending radiology images into the cloud. It is possible, if the hospital system can support it, to send the DICOM files directly to the Photon cloud, but most customers opt instead for on-site pre-processing.

The virtual machine will run a series of Windows Services developed by Photon that act as a functioning AE on the PACs network. They can receive DICOM files pushed by the hospital PACs and will write the files to the local disk. Additional Photon services will then read the file from the disk, convert to a lossless JPEG, and push the image to the Photon Cloud. The DICOM file is then deleted from the local disk.

The Photon platform is built to receive all radiology studies without filters. In this way, images are available as soon as possible to clinicians, and can quickly be viewed inside the Photon application.

System Requirements

The following are minimum requirements for image processing:

• Windows v10 or greater, or Windows Server 2016 or greater

• Local administrative user that Photon technical support staff can use via Remote Desktop through the secure VPN (no network access needed beyond the local machine)

• 16 GB Memory or more

• 256 GB hard drive space or more

• All Photon related folders (typically found at C:\Photon) and subfolders must be excluded from any local virus scan due to the large quantity of file reads and writes.

Hospital Internal Policies

Photon will work with the hospital to respect their internal server and security policies as best as we can. Our goal is to service the virtual machine remotely via the secure VPN to ensure uptime and speed.

Some requirements may need to be adjusted should the hospital have an unusually high volume of radiology studies. Our system is designed to allow for multiple virtual machines or larger virtual machines as needed. The above minimum requirements services the vast majority of single hospital systems.