This is an article I caught off HealthImaging.com, in addition, Representatives from Microsoft has posted this into several industry usergroups and forums; Microsoft’s personal health record (PHR) product – HealthVault, is seeking comment from the diagnostic imaging IT development community on its initial draft design for medical image data types.
Aimed to provide answer around the utilization of DICOM c-FIND, XDS-i support as well as a selection of medical image study and series type DICOM tags. The firm is looking to be able to allow the transfer and storage of existing medical images to the HealthVault PHR.
According to Microsoft, “the image data stored using this data type will be large in both quantity and size and our current XML storage approach doesn’t optimize for binary content like images. To help mitigate this, HealthVault provides separate binary storage we call blob storage (blobs). Each instance of data in HealthVault can also include a blob of additional data and with the introduction of this data type, the HealthVault platform will support multiple named blobs per data instance.”
The draft design is open for inspection and comment at: http://blogs.msdn.com/healthvaultdatatypes/archive/2009/07/09/for-review-medical-image-study.aspx
BinaryHealthCare (BNHC) 