Sharing medical imaging over the cloud services

Over the past decades, healthcare institutions adopted Picture Archive and Communication Systems in their workflows. The exchange and interaction between different equipment is performed with Digital Imaging Communication in Medicine (DICOM), which is a very extensive protocol covering many areas of the imaging laboratories. However, the communication of a wide domain composed by several medical institutions is not well supported. In the last few years, Cloud computing has been used to allow communication anytime and anywhere. This new paradigm creates new opportunities to share information that can be always available. The proposed implementation is supported on the public cloud resources that are available on the Internet, creating the opportunity to exchange information between the medical devices inside the institutions with another devices located in another institution. Despite of the advantages of the cloud computing, it also brings new challenges regarding the data privacy when the medical data are transmitted over different domains. This paper presents a solution to share DICOM services across healthcare institutions without breaking DICOM based on cloud. A solution to tackle these issues was proposed, creating a ciphered channel between the entities that are sharing DICOM services. In this paper we explored the application of cloud computing to share medical imaging data across different institutions providing privacy and confidentiality to the involved entities.