Hampered by an obsolete, unstable legacy PACS and the upcoming renewal of a costly maintenance contract, in 2012 University Radiology sought to replace its existing image management technology with a state of the art Fuji Synapse solution. To support the practice’s ongoing high quality service and significant exam volume, the project was deemed mission critical. At that time, University Radiology already comprised 15 freestanding centers. A large inventory of studies was targeted for migration to the new Synapse archive at University Radiology’s East Brunswick headquarters, bringing with it a long list of challenges. Because of the complexity, Fuji believed Laitek’s specialized data migration expertise was needed to ensure success.

Key Challenges:

• Decommissioning the current Siemens SIENET PACS and migrating a net inventory of 833,734 studies to the new Fuji archive
• An accelerated project timeframe due to the legacy system’s significant instability and pending maintenance contract renewal
• Upgrading older studies in a variety of legacy DICOM formats
• Preserving image annotations and other crucial proprietary data elements
• Reconciling widespread archived study duplication, which prevented transfer of certain exams to the Fuji system

Outcome:

Overcoming the inefficiencies of DICOM application based migration, Laitek’s innovative Migratek migration technology accessed University Radiology’s data at the archival level to speed transfer in excess of one terabyte per day using multiple migration streams. All data was fully validated prior to transfer and verified for accuracy at the pixel level at its destination. Image annotations and other proprietary information were successfully converted to standards based formatting. Original data remained fully recoverable following any study transformations.

The large scale migration was completed in just 18 months with a 98.35% success rate with no impact on radiologist workflow. Throughout, University Radiology had ongoing access to both new and historical studies.

Customer Comment:
“The entire process was easy from the beginning. Laitek alleviated the biggest fear in putting in a new PACS – the uncertainty you’ll have all the priors the physicians need. Our physicians don’t ask for priors. They were taken out of the legacy and are safe and accessible and we know they have what they need. You really couldn’t ask for more.” -Judy Gronlund-Jacob, Manager PACS and Tele radiology, University Radiology