Rapid Migration of Legacy DICOM Studies
A large metropolitan medical center, began a migration effort to a centralized archive with legacy cardiology images from two different, PACS repositories at two of its divisions — one that included almost 8 terabytes (TB) of data stored on legacy tape back-up systems at one campus and another system at another campus that was on spinning disc and DVD media with nearly 18 TB of data. After working through various data patching efforts, the strategy was to move to a more modern system. The IT team worked with an outside vendor and purchased a migration package that would utilize a traditional data migration approach. In this traditional approach, the migration was handled using a tool that would query the source tapes and DVDs through standard DICOM calls to identify all of the images in that system and move the images from the source PACS to the target new PACS.
After nearly 60 months of effort, the migration team had not been able complete the migration using the traditional DICOM query-retrieve approach. While every migration poses difficult challenges due to differences in the ways disparate PACS store images, it was clear they needed a new approach to move the data from the aging hardware on the two separate campuses to its new PACS environment.
The Mach7 Technologies Solution
Eventually, the team collaborated with Mach 7 Technologies to develop a new DICOM data migration tool called the Keystone Rapid Migration Utility (RMU). The Keystone RMU application has been developed utilizing Mach 7 Technologies’ Keystone Suite™ Enterprise Image Management Platform software.
The IT team discovered that the Keystone Rapid Migration Utility, which can handle migrations in the traditional (through-the-PACS) approach, offered an alternative that dramatically sped up the migration process. Because the source PACS had stored images in standard DICOM format, instead of querying through the PACS system, the Keystone RMU went directly to the files on the file system, pulled those files off the file system, and moved them into the new target PACS.
Benefits
The result of the RMU effort was dramatically different from the initial migration effort: after completing some 3 - 4 months of collaborative application development and testing with Mach 7 Technologies, the medical center IT team completed the migration and complete validation of nearly 18 TB of data in just 8 weeks, 3 weeks for the 12 TBs of online data and 5 weeks for the more labor intensive offline data.
 Montefiore Medical Center Rapid Migration Project
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