Business issues
An advanced heart-lung X-ray examination can produce images corresponding to one gigabyte of data. A CT scan can produce 700 images at half a megabyte each. With approximately 15,000 new digital X-ray images per day - one every 10 seconds - Lund University Hospital has one of Sweden's largest digital storage solutions. This requires smart storage and cost efficiency.

Solutions
The StorageTek. concept of Information Lifecycle Management (ILM) was something no one knew about in 1997 when Gudmund Svahn, hospital physicist and the person responsible for the digital image system at Lund University Hospital, began to plan the storage solution. Nevertheless, Svahn used these principles in his plan.

"The retrieval period for images stored on disk is perhaps a few seconds. Images from faster tape in a T9840 tape drive can be retrieved within a minute. If the examination material is stored on DLT tape, it may take between two and seven minutes to retrieve it," said Svahn.

The system has been set so that, as long as the images are used often, they will remain on the faster disk. Each time an examination is retrieved, the timer is reset. In addition, most surgeries are planned and the storage solution is integrated with the surgery booking so that the needed X-rays are automatically transferred to the hard disk the day before the surgical procedure.

Lund University Hospital has not performed any exact calculations on how much is saved (ROI), but has found -clearly - that the new system saves time and money. Previously, a large physical archive was required for all the images, as well as additional personnel for management of this system. Now most of these functions are performed automatically.