The Fifth Elephant 2012

Gone, or rather going, are the days when you would exit a doctor’s chamber an X-ray plate in your hand. Medical imaging has turned filmless today - with the advent of CT, MR, and digital X-Ray machines churning out gigabytes of data in every tier 1 & 2 Indian city for each patient, are we prepared to archive, transfer and retrieve this data ?

Outline

This is a journey through a marshy problem land.

We take a look at the basics of medical imaging, the structure and size of the data generated and explore the challenges of large data archival, compression techniques, and image transfer across low-bandwidth network.

Finally, we wrap up with possible directions of research where independent researchers can make progress, necessary open source toolkits needed and where to get the relevant datasets from.

(While I draw upon my experiences from my career, the talk is fairly vendor-neutral and does not represent my company.)

Speaker bio

Shourya is a Senior Engineering Manager at GE Healthcare and currently leads the development team for enterprise image store. He started as a programmer in the common platforms group and has wandered in the realm of large data management, image reconstruction and clinical visualization for the last 12 years.