by
John R. Fischer, Senior Reporter | July 31, 2023
AWS HealthImaging enables users to develop cloud-based applications for storing, analyzing, and sharing medical imaging data at petabyte-scale.
Amazon Web Services has launched AWS HealthImaging, a service for creating cloud-native applications for storing, analyzing, and sharing medical imaging data at petabyte-scale (quadrillions of bytes).
As imaging procedures and studies continue to climb in volume, healthcare IT providers need to be able to store growing amounts of data and archived medical imaging files for care teams, researchers, and other medical groups to access and utilize from anywhere at any time. The cloud has emerged as a viable solution to these problems, and Amazon has entered the fray.
Here are three ways AWS HealthImaging is poised to improve medical imaging data access:
- No duplicate images – Users across the same enterprise can access a single authoritative copy of data from anywhere, reducing infrastructure, storage costs, operational complexity, and uncertainty among different users on whether an image is authoritative.
- Subsecond data retrieval – Every image frame stored can be accessed and rendered in milliseconds. HealthImaging’s Frequent Access storage tier can be used for new and frequently accessed data, and its Archive Instant Access tier is designed for infrequently accessed data.
- Scale data processing and resolution – Individual DICOM P10 files are imported as image frames and automatically organized in image sets that are consistent with patient metadata, study, and series levels. The pixel data of each file is encoded as High-Throughput JPEG 2000 (HTJ2K), a state-of-the-art image compression codec for lossless compression and scaling resolution. Users can also perform multiple independent imports concurrently, and pixel data encoding and metadata normalization are performed automatically, reducing migration costs for AWS HealthImaging. There is no import charge for the service.
Wake Forest Baptist Health in North Carolina is already using AWS HealthImaging in an effort to make clinical data more accessible, while Philips has plans to integrate it into its medical imaging solutions.
NVIDIA is investing in tools and frameworks that can be used alongside AWS HealthImaging to advance algorithm development and AI adoption in medical imaging.
