Re: medical image database

In addition to storing and retrieval of the image files, you might want to consider two other important issues.

First issue is whether you want to serve these images to the web. If so, you need to consider a technique before hand, to convert the blob data into a browser affinitive mime formatted package in realtime. Trying to detach it into a temporary file and serving the file name as a HREF link kills the performance and compromises content security. From this perspective, it will be a big advantage if you could store the image as an image file (like an attachment) instead of blob data. I know Lotus Notes (arghhh!) can do that, but not aware of any other tool that can do it. You could store all your relational application data in DB2 and store the image as an attachment in a Lotus Notes based image repository. Good thing with LN is, the attachment can be automatically served up as a URL (without detaching, or mime encoding) to the web browsers, or as a file to the thick-client apps.

Second issue you need to take care is the application security. In reality, you would need to orchestrate your entire application security around the image field in your database - like who can edit it, read it, dump it, etc. So design your application security schema with considerable thought.

On the whole, storing the images as files in the file system is dumb. "I Love You" virus ate a lot of such image banks all over the world, a few months ago. Encapsulating them in some repository would have prevented this. But it has to be done carefully, otherwise, your image content will be unusable.

-S

In article <399C21FE.F3C3C8C2_at_v1.wustl.edu>,   James Dickson <jdickson_at_v1.wustl.edu> wrote:
>
> I am currently designing a database with Sybase to store large
> quantities of Magnetic Resonance Image data and numerous experimental
> data files. These files are currently residing on the filesystem and
> generally consist of an attribute based header and raw data . I am
> trying to decide whether to insert this data into the database as
> text/blob data or insert the attribute data from the header and store
> the raw data in the filesystem.
>
> Any advice on the pros/cons of either approach is appreciated.
>
> James Dickson
>
>

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Before you buy. Received on Mon Aug 21 2000 - 15:14:30 CEST