Redirection of client/server relationship of X Window system as a simple, low-cost, departmental picture archiving and communication system solution for nuclear medicine.

Picture archiving and communication systems (PACS) offer significant advantages over current film-management techniques. However, PACS are complex and expensive, factors that have limited their entry into the radiology and nuclear medicine communities. We present a simple, low-cost PACS solution that allows viewing of images from different computer systems by redirection of the X Window system. In this technique, multiple copies of the imaging software are remotely opened from generic UNIX workstations interfaced to the main computer system via Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol over Ethernet. The X Window system that provides the windowing system for the main computer is redirected to the workstations' displays. With this technique, viewing and processing of images on a remote station is virtually identical to working at the main computer's console. The technique requires that the commercial imaging system's hardware, operating system, and imaging software support multiuser multitasking and the execution of multiple copies of its imaging software, and that they use X Windows as the graphical system. Advantages of the technique include low cost, ease of maintenance, ease of interconnecting different types of computers, the capacity to view images regardless of file format, and the capacity to both view and process images. The latter is a necessity for modalities such as nuclear medicine. A disadvantage of the technique is that the number of nodes that can be supported is limited.