Application of Asynchronous Transfer Mode (Atm) technology to Picture Archiving and Communication Systems (Pacs): A survey

Broadband Integrated Services Digital Network (R-ISDN) provides a range of narrowband and broad-band services for voice, video, and multimedia. Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) has been selected by the standards bodies as the transfer mode for implementing B-ISDN; The ability to digitize images has lead to the prospect of reducing the physical space requirements, material costs, and manual labor of traditional film handling tasks in hospitals. The system which handles the acquisition, storage, and transmission of medical images is called a Picture Archiving and Communication System (PACS). The transmission system will directly impact the speed of image transfer. Today the most common transmission means used by acquisition and display station products is Ethernet. However, when considering network media, it is important to consider what the long term needs will be. Although ATM is a new standard, it is showing signs of becoming the next logical step to meet the needs of high speed networks; This thesis is a survey on ATM, and PACS. All the concepts involved in developing a PACS are presented in an orderly manner. It presents the recent developments in ATM, its applicability to PACS and the issues to be resolved for realising an ATM-based complete PACS. This work will be useful in providing the latest information, for any future research on ATM-based networks, and PACS