Business issues
The Astrid Lindgren Children's Hospital is a division of Karolinska Hospital and is dedicated to specialized care for children and young people, as well as research and development. The hospital has a highly specialized pediatric radiology department. Every year, a total of about 48,000 X-ray examinations are conducted. In the ongoing struggle of shrinking budgets and increased demands for better service, management knew that digital X-ray could help save time and money. In addition, comparing recent X-rays with older ones and, based on the result, determining whether changes have occurred, is an essential part of X-ray diagnostics. Storage of images in an image bank offering rapid access to older images, was, therefore, essential.

Solutions
To meet these needs, the radiology department introduced a solution based on PACS (Picture Archiving and Communication System). PACS is a complete image-management system for taking X-ray images, making diagnoses based on X-ray images, and distributing and digitally storing those images. StorageTek was selected to supply the new storage solution that would replace the tape library. The new solution is based on the StorageTek 9176 RAID system.

Business benefits
Hospital efficiency has improved because old images can be quickly retrieved from the digital storage bank for comparison with recently taken images. When new X-ray images must be taken, previous X-ray images may be retrieved from the bank if needed. This has meant a considerable reduction in the amount of space required for analog film storage because digital archives require only a fraction of the space that film-based radiology departments require. Despite this fact, the volume of data that may be stored is huge.