An Innovative CT Storage Solution for North West London Hospitals NHS Trust.

Pukka-j provides a cost-effective answer to the large volumes of data generated by the new multi-slice CT scanners.

The solution for North West London Hospitals (NWLH) was a Pukka-j Image Store System consisting of two separate CT image stores, one store being located at Northwick Park Hospital and the other at Central Middlesex Hospital.   Each CT Store is configured to act as a primary data repository for locally-acquired CT data and a secondary back-up store for CT data acquired by other hospitals in the Trust.   The Pukka-j model provides a highly robust system, where all data is available on-line for accessing from both sites by the PACS Manager and the radiologists.   In addition, the CT stores are organised in such a way as to allow local radiologists quick access to their locally-acquired data.  The Pukka-j CT Store at Northwick Park connects to a Philips CT Scanner and three Extended Brilliance workstations, as well as a Toshiba CT scanner with four Vitrea workstations.  At Central Middlesex, the Store is connected to a Philips CT scanner and three Extended Brilliance Workstations.

 

Adham Nicola, PACS Manager at the Trust says:

We were looking for a robust and secure solution that enables us to store and review effectively the huge volumes of thin-slice imaging data produced by two 64-slice and one 32- slice CT scanners.   Ideally, the data needed to be kept separately from the main PACS system in order to preserve archive space, and also to improve data access times for radiologists and Trust clinicians alike. At the same time, we wanted to eliminate the previous laborious workflow of storing CT data on external disks.

For The Pukka-j installation proved to be easy and less expensive than comparative systems.  The hardware consists of 30TB’s spread across two 15TB CT Image Stores, each image store being an exact replication in configuration and providing a total of 28TB on-line storage capacity.  

The back-up server partition significantly improves the redundancy of both image stores by offering a complete on-line back-up held on the opposite physically separate server.   Should one serve fail, the mirrored data can be easily accessed from anywhere on the NWLH network. For highly resilient systems, Pukka-j recommends that the multiple archives be housed in separate locations and in this case, one server resides at Northwick Park and the other at Central Middlesex.

Data stored on the system can either be pulled directly back onto the CT scanners  and workstations, or viewed directly at any networked PC using the in-built web-viewer. users.

Adham Nicola continues;

We are impressed with the Pukka-j viewer, and especially with its built-in MPR functionality, which these days is an essential CT reporting tool.  The installation went without a hitch, thanks to Pukka-j’s competent and efficient engineers.

The next phase of the project will be to work closely with the radiologists to decide which levels of compression can be applied to help improve data transmission times in support of teleradiology.   Pukka-j has fast tracked its development of a specific tool to allow NWLH to test and view the compression results across a mix of data.

In addition, in a few weeks time, Pukka-j will be upgrading the NWLH viewing system to include its latest multi-slice thumbnail review tools.   The new viewing options, combined with data compression, will greatly improve the performance issues facing the Trust with the retrieval and reporting multi-slice CT datasets across the NWLH Trust.

 Adham Nicola concludes;

We found Pukka-j an incredibly responsive company to work with and the Image Store give us an economical extra storage solution.  The North West London Hospitals NHS Trust manages Northwick Park & St. Mark’s and Central Middlesex Hospitals.   Each year, we care for more than half a million people across Brent, Harrow and beyond, making us one of the biggest and busiest NHS Trusts in the capital.