Explore HPE-Certified Cloud-Ready Storage for GE HealthCare Imaging Solutions

By Nick White, healthcare and life sciences solutions product manager, HPE hybrid cloud, HPE

As a leading imaging systems vendor, GE HealthCare Technologies, Inc. is aware of how important the design and spec of their customer’s underlying infrastructure is to the operation and overall performance of their imaging solutions.

(image source: HPE)

Learn why GE HealthCare values HPE Alletra MP, HPE Apollo 4000, and Qumulo, Inc. for their customers’ medical imaging infrastructure.

Medical imaging data challenge
Healthcare represents significant percentage of total global data and is forecasted to reach a CAGR of approximately by the year 2025. The provision and delivery of health care generates and requires the management of many types of data including the operational data within ERP and finance systems, or the core patient records managed in an Electronic Health/Medical Records system. 

The National Library of Medicine states that 80%+ of healthcare data is unstructured. Digital PACS, pathology, and long term archives are collectively generating and storing petabytes of medical imaging data. Technology advancements, increasing file or study size, and the growing frequency of these procedures all add up to the ever more rapid growth of imaging data. 

Here, I’m focusing specifically on the challenge healthcare providers face in addressing the capture, retention, and management of the medical imaging data that is constantly being generated and typically held for decades. 

Factors driving growth of imaging data

Key factors include: 

• Advancing imaging technologies that generate ever larger study files.
• Increased use of medical imaging procedures during diagnosis and treatment.
• Extremely lengthy retention periods equating to a growing mountain of imaging data.

The growth of medical imaging data presents several specific challenges to a provider. Capacity needs to be flexible and easily increased to accommodate growth but predicting and provisioning capacity in advance can be a challenging and costly process.  All imaging data needs to be secure, immutable, and accessible regardless of age.

Medical imaging data types – Cached image performance vs. image long-term archive (LTA)
Typically, a PACS (picture archiving and communication system) or VNA (vendor neutral archive ⁽²⁾ ) managing imaging data will require a 2-to3 tier storage architecture, depending on the vendor-specific architecture.

Newly generated images are held locally in an ‘image cache’ while under physician review for a period of weeks, months, or potentially more than a year. The image cache requires sufficiently performant storage to facilitate rapid retrieval as ‘time to desktop’ is a critical metric in physician efficiency. Mere seconds delay in the retrieval and display of a large file image to desktop can impact a physician’s productivity/cost. 

Following this ‘active’ period the image moves to lower cost/cool long-term archive (LTA) storage. The vast percentage of a provider’s images are likely to have been archived and held in large capacity, highly scalable storage that ensures the data is secure and immutable for an indefinite timeframe and does not require the same level of performance as the image cache. However, despite being ‘cold’ archived rather than ‘hot’ transactional data, any one individual study must be readily accessible with reasonable retrieval performance and minimal cost. The size of an image archive can vary with extreme examples potentially exceeding 100PB, at which point maintaining secure immutable accessible storage across a large organization can become both challenging extremely and costly. 

Cached image data performance vs. image Long-Term Archive (LTA)
This archive storage may be the imaging data’s final storage destination, or a precursor to an even lower-cost, longer-term storage archive tier. That’s why the vast percentage of a provider’s images are likely to have been archived and held in large capacity, highly scalable storage that ensures the data is secure and immutable for an indefinite timeframe. 

GE HealthCare customer solutions
Leading medical imaging systems vendor GE HealthCare has a comprehensive diagnostic technology portfolio of advanced high-resolution imaging solutions complete with image analytics, and the sophisticated workflow and enterprise image management functionality to better support the effective provision of care, and operational efficiency of the provider. As a mature vendor, GE HealthCare is highly aware of how important the design and specification of their customer’s underlying infrastructure is to the performance, and overall operation of their imaging systems. 

GE HealthCare HPE reference architectures
HPE has a long history of working with GE HealthCare in New Jersey for testing and optimization of right-sized infrastructure reference architectures enabling GE HealthCare to provide comprehensive customer guidance on the architecture, sizing, and configuration of suitable data management infrastructure based upon HPE storage and compute portfolios.

GE HealthCare infrastructure designs are based on the size of the installation and estimated annual volume imaging studies.HPE MSA and/or HPE StoreEasy platforms are validated by GE HealthCare for smaller customers and HPE GreenLake for Block Storage on Alletra Storage MP and Apollo 4200 for Qumulo have proven optimal for the performance and capacity requirements of the complete imaging stack deployed at medium to very large customers.

HPE solution performance enables GE HealthCare to offer small, medium, and large architecture designs covering single and multi-sites with synchronous or synchronous replication, and facilitating up to 4 million studies/annum. 

HPE solutions for GE Healthcare
These HPE storage solutions are available as part of the GE HealthCare customer agreement, or directly from HPE account manager or authorized company’s channel partner.

⁽¹⁾ RBC Capital Markets, The Healthcare Data Explosion
⁽²⁾ A VNA solution primarily focuses on centralized storage, management, and long-term archiving of medical images and associated data from various imaging systems, regardless of vendor or format. 

Resources :
GreenLake for Block Storage built on HPE Alletra Storage MP    
GreenLake for Block Storage MP data-at-rest encryption   
Apollo 4200 Gen10 Plus System quick specs