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AWS Launches Health Data Platform To Solve Imaging Headaches
The new AWS HealthImaging service is designed to reduce the complexity inherent in storing, archiving, accessing and sharing petabytes worth of medical imaging data.
Amazon Web Services has unveiled a new service to help healthcare providers reduce the complexity of storing, archiving and accessing medical imaging data.
AWS HealthImaging is designed for developers who build cloud-native medical imaging software, which typically need to be able to support petabyte-scale storage of sensitive imaging data and fluctuating archiving and accessibility needs.
The volume of medical imaging data has skyrocketed in recent years, noted AWS, the result of an overall increase in the number of medical imaging procedures done every day, as well as an increase in the average scale of imaging studies. Inevitably, this growth in volume has also meant an increase in the amount of duplicated data.
Different applications often need to access the same images, "each with different latency and resolution needs," noted AWS in its announcement. "This results in their storing several cached copies of each image for various applications, plus additional copies for long-term storage."
In addition, "Collaborations across care teams and research groups can lead to still more copies of data. Care teams typically require fully identified data, whereas teams building AI models may prefer to use de-identified data."
All of this duplicated data (which has been traditionally stored on-premises) results in higher storage costs, higher on-premises infrastructure costs, confusion about the provenance of an image, data silos and just overall unecessary complexity. HealthImaging promises to streamline the process of storing, accessing and sharing imaging data.
"With HealthImaging, all the applications across an organization can access a single authoritative copy of data without duplication, and users can securely access the data from anywhere," said AWS. "With just a few clicks in the HealthImaging console, you can provision a data store capable of hosting petabytes of medical imaging data, maintaining every image ready for low-latency retrieval. Further, HealthImaging reduces the amount of infrastructure required to operate enterprise imaging solutions, and that helps you save cost and reduce operational complexity."
HealthImaging offers two storage tiers, one for frequently accessed images and one for infrequently accessed images. Data can be retrieved in milliseconds, according to AWS, with "sub-second latency" for each image frame.
"Our customers and partners are tirelessly innovating on behalf of patients. HealthImaging is helping them provide high-quality care to more patients in need," AWS said. "HealthImaging makes it easier to manage medical imaging data at petabyte-scale, with industry leading performance, and freedom from worrying about infrastructure."
More information about AWS HealthImaging is available here.