Industry Glossary

Industry Glossary

The healthcare industry’s ever-evolving technology and legislative front can make it challenging to stay current with the latest terminologies; however it is imperative that we maintain a solid understanding of current terms in order to make the most effective assessments and decisions. Laitek has assembled this glossary to facilitate your understanding of data migration and storage to help you identify the ideal course for your organization.

A blacklisted study/modality will not be migrated. Blacklisting can be requested to ensure they are not migrated or require action to resolve conditions such as: no primary accession number, no RIS patient record, study has duplicate reports, etc.

A DICOM service to query a Service Class Provider (SCP) for matching patients, studies, series and instances.

Once a full DICOM inventory of studies in the source PACS system is complete, Laitek provides a C-FIND Inventory Assessment Report.

See Validation: C-FIND

See RIS/PACS Reconciliation

A Laitek software module that permits Semperdata® to transfer studies to or from a specific PACS.

A Laitek software module, specific to each type and version of source PACS, that extracts DICOM data directly from the Storage and the database of the source PACS. The rapid connector bypasses the source PACS’ DICOM software, enabling faster transfer than using DICOM CMOVE, without slowing or destabilizing the source PACS still in clinical operation.

Crosswalks map identifiers and data from one scheme into a different scheme – it is a table that shows equivalent elements or fields or codes in more than one schema. Crosswalking means mapping or translating a code for one set to another.

Laitek reviews customer provided information and validates the entries to be used for the migration into the migration engine, once the crosswalk has been reviewed by Laitek and is ready to load/apply to migration.

The process of loading crosswalks from the Legacy PACS database, used to validate image counts, match reports with images and update the inventory.

The mapping of the list of legacy procedures to target procedures.

Any one of several extracts

See PACS,Target

Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine. A software integration standard used in medical imaging. All modern medical imaging sytems support DICOM. Everything is treated as an object. Every object is stored, processed or transferred.

See PACS, Source PACS Extraction

For legacy PACS that use an HSM to manage the media, Laitek has automated scripts that invoke HSM functions to efficiently read data from storage volumes and transfer it to buffers in the migration server.

Special care is taken with tape-based archives to read data in the order that it is written on the media, to avoid the severe performance impact and tape wear that results from random-access extraction of migration data. Migratek® servers are configured with multi-terabyte disk buffers whenever near-line media are involved. HSMs also manage backup of archived data on duplicate or triplicate media.

Laitek handles the retrieval from secondary storage, interacting with data center personnel as necessary, when recovery from backup media is required.

See Validation, Image Count Validation

Migration of data between clinical information systems; a project or undertaking whose focus is the movement of data objects; the movement of data objects from a source/legacy to a target; the movement of data objects from a source to a staging archive like Semperdata®, (SDA); the movement of data objects from a staging archive like Semperdata® to a target. The process of sending studies(Image/ Reports) into the target PACS.

Extracting studies from legacy/source PACS to Semperdata® (SDA) migration server. Also referred to as extraction. See PACS: Source PACS Extraction.

Sending studies from the Laitek Semperdata® (SDA) migration server to the target PACS.

A defined set of studies (or reports for HL7 migrations) based on criteria such as: date range, modality image, size, etc. Laitek configures streams based on criteria. The studies are sent serially to the destination system.

A collection of streams with the same set of selection criteria. Activating multiple streams within a stream group allows parallelism in transmitting to a set of targets.

This is a process of moving studies. Stream group inbound are studies that match certain criteria as defined by the stream, that are sent from the legacy system to the migration server/Semperdata® (SDA).

This is a process of moving studies. Stream group outbound are studies that match certain criteria as defined by the stream, that are sent from the migration server to the target. Note: a stream group can be a single stream.

Some legacy systems, particularly cardiovascular and interventional systems, rely on large collections of CD or DVD shelf media for their archived data. Laitek provides a robotic reader device that inputs batches of 50 or 100 disks assembled and loaded by customer personnel.

Legacy PACS image data may be stored in online disk arrays (RAID / NAS / SAN), near-line sets of optical disks and tapes in robotic libraries, or offline shelf storage of tapes or disks. When any of the legacy data is in near-line or off-line storage, the data migration project contains an element of manual media handling.

Medical imaging equipment is used to produce tomographic images of cross-sections of the body such as radiography, ultrasound and magnetic resonance imaging. Modalities: CT, MRI, PET, PET-CT, Ultrasound, X-Ray. Modality is a data attribute that classifies diagnostic data by clinical specialty or data type.

Modality Worklist enables primary imaging equipment (modalities) to query (using C-FIND) for Patient Demographics and Study Details from the MWL SCP, normally part of the RIS or the PACS.

The modality asks for a list of patients with chosen criteria via Standard C-FIND operation and Modality Worklist responds accordingly. As one of DICOM’s workflow services, the DICOM images that the modality will create labeled with attributes received from the MWL.

When MWL is implemented, the Study Instance UID is generated in the RIS so if a multi-modality procedure is done, each modality will create a series and attach it to the Study by using the Study Instance UID received in the MWL query.

Common term for a DICOM SOP Instance, containing a single image, multiframe image, or other data.

Picture Archiving and Communication System.