DICOM Gateway Anonymizer: A Cloud architecture for a scalable research PACS
Rui Jesus, José Frias, Pedro F Gouveia, João Santinha, Luís A. Bastião Silva, Carlos M. A. Costa · 2024
Medical imaging informatics has revolutionized healthcare practice. Images are now stored on a central server and can be accessed remotely through web technologies and standard formats. These images are accompanied by patient-identifiable metadata, allowing systems to execute queries based on that data and present it alongside the pixel data. Despite these advantages, this data has privacy constraints when sharing and reusing it in different scenarios. In research, there is an urgent need for large volumes of data to develop new technologies for diagnosis and therapy purposes. We propose a cloud-ready architecture to build a collaborative environment with anonymized images that can be safely used in research. The solution is based entirely on open-source components, allowing the construction of anonymization pipelines that process and forward images to distinct repositories. The proposal is resilient and scalable and has been tested in a production setting for several clinical studies and use cases.