Maximizing the DICOM Standard for Digital Pathology Routing, Ingesting, and Storing—Dicom Systems and Pure Storage Whitepaper

Dicom Systems and Pure Storage conducted testing to evaluate routing functionality of the Dicom Systems Unifier® platform and the management of the digitized pathology DICOM slides on Pure Storage. We also measured the Ingest performance of WSIs writing to Pure Storage to measure data storage’s impact. In the testing, we measured throughput, slide transmission count, and latency, broken into WSI routing and ingestion. The industry average size of a digital pathology slide, 1.3 GB, was used for this whitepaper to calculate results. It is important to note that in some cases, like radical prostatectomies, an uncompressed 20x WSI can require nearly 30 GB of storage. At the recommended 40x magnification, the same file size can increase to 100 GB.

Our testing concluded that Dicom Systems, in combination with Pure Storage, can effortlessly route ~85,735 slides daily, equivalent to managing the traffic of 29 3DHistech Pannoramic® 1000 scanners sending slides 24/7,* and ingest ~36,953 slides daily, equivalent to 13.5x the annual volume of a single, large pathology organization.**