Yizhong Cloud Computing Service for Hospitals: Revolutionizing Medical Imaging Data Management

Internet healthcare has brought significant convenience to patients seeking medical care. A large number of hospitals have launched a series of services, such as online appointment registration, push notifications for laboratory test results and examination reports, and online payment. However, to date, internet healthcare products in China have yet to establish a commercially viable model at scale for hospitals, nor have they identified any rigid demand within physicians’ daily diagnostic workflows. Beijing Long Term Information Technology Co., Ltd. is attempting to break this deadlock with its YZH Cloud imaging data service, leveraging proprietary cloud computing technology to address an increasingly pressing challenge faced by hospitals.

The market for medical imaging diagnosis is vast, with data volume growing rapidly.

Medical imaging examinations are playing an increasingly significant role in the diagnostic process. The diagnostic revenue of public hospitals is projected to exceed RMB 260 billion in 2016, with imaging examinations alone accounting for nearly half of this share. The market size for consumables associated with imaging examinations has also reached tens of billions of yuan and continues to maintain double-digit annual growth. As the volume of examinations increases and the precision of imaging improves, hospitals are facing increasingly severe challenges in storing imaging data.

Medical imaging consists of specialized grayscale images. These data files are large in size and highly fragmented, with hundreds to thousands of slices per examination exhibiting strong inter-slice correlations. More than half of the hospitals in China have successively procured Picture Archiving and Communication Systems (PACS) specifically for the storage and management of imaging data. Traditional PACS database structures and storage architectures impose stringent requirements on hardware such as servers and storage devices, as well as on network infrastructure. Moreover, the archiving of massive volumes of data has exceeded the support capabilities of traditional PACS. Storing and importing imaging data typically takes several minutes, and the speed of retrieving data through the system becomes increasingly intolerable in larger hospitals. Traditional PACS systems perform even more poorly in supporting concurrent access; radiology departments have already encountered bottlenecks, making it impossible to provide effective data access support to clinical departments within controllable investment levels.

The Data Storage Dilemma Drives Hospitals to Seek Cloud Computing Solutions

To alleviate this predicament, hospitals are in urgent need of an imaging cloud computing service model, marking a transition from hardware and software procurement to a service-based procurement model. Domestic cloud platform providers, such as Alibaba Cloud, Tencent Cloud, and China Telecom’s Tianyi Cloud, have launched IaaS solutions tailored for medical image storage. However, due to the specific requirements of medical image archiving management and transmission protocols, these cloud platform providers lack the capability to deliver SaaS-level imaging computation services. Existing imaging cloud computing products are built upon traditional PACS architectures; under conditions of limited bandwidth and computational resources, they can only barely support a small volume of remote diagnostic operations, completely lacking the capacity to handle large-scale medical image data transmission, storage, and access.

Cloud Storage Poses Revolutionary Demands on Traditional PACS System Architecture

YZH Cloud Imaging Data Services have overcome technical bottlenecks and established a comprehensive solution, offering a revolutionary option for hospitals to reduce costs, improve efficiency, and enhance the stability of their information technology services. Since its launch nearly three months ago, YZH Cloud has progressively enabled imaging data storage and hosting services for 15 medical institutions.

YZH Cloud’s image compression and data processing technologies have significantly enhanced the speed of data transmission and retrieval. Statistical tracking of real-world customer scenarios shows that, with a 20 Mbps upstream bandwidth on the public internet, it takes an average of just 2 minutes to receive, process, and upload 100 MB of imaging data for viewing on front-end devices—faster than most PACS systems operating on gigabit local area networks. Opening images over standard 3G/4G networks takes only 1–2 seconds, far outpacing retrieval speeds within local area networks.

To deliver this experience, the cost burden on hospitals is reduced by approximately 90%. Implementation costs have also been significantly lowered. The largest hospital currently served handles over 10,000 outpatient visits per day and completes more than 1,000 imaging examinations daily; the smallest hospital served performs only dozens of imaging examinations per day. Despite supporting imaging data services at such a large scale, the computational resources invested by YZH Cloud are negligible. Current tests show that a single server can handle around 3,000 concurrent accesses, which is far from its limit, leaving substantial idle computational resources.

More products and service models have been implemented.

The ultimate speed and support for concurrent access enable YZH Cloud to provide doctors and patients with more service models based on data storage:

• First, mobile and web-based image viewing solutions were added to the traditional workstation model, enabling radiologists to access imaging data and complete report entry anytime and anywhere.

  
  

• In addition, YZH Cloud’s front-end viewing products (PC workstations, mobile apps, and WeChat clients) impose no limits on the number of licenses, enabling more clinicians in various departments to access original digital images. Even three-dimensional images are made available to clinical physicians, thereby enhancing the precision of clinical diagnosis and treatment.

  
  

• Inter-hospital collaboration, such as regional imaging data interoperability, outsourced imaging diagnosis, and remote consultations, can be conducted more conveniently and professionally through the YZH Cloud platform. Features provided by YZH Cloud—including WeChat forwarding of original images, encryption and de-identification services, and time-capsule authorization—enable highly flexible diagnostic collaboration and communication among physicians based on medical images, while ensuring the professionalism of imaging data and safeguarding patient privacy.

  
  

• Robust multi-visit support further enhances convenience for patients. Currently, patients undergoing imaging examinations typically receive only film prints. If they require complete imaging data with richer diagnostic information, they can request CD burning services at a very limited number of hospitals, usually at a regulated price of 50 RMB. However, as optical drives are gradually becoming obsolete, cloud-based data storage is emerging as an alternative. YZH Cloud’s “Mobile Film” service is currently undergoing public beta testing at three partner hospitals. It has already created highly valuable personal imaging archives for many patients with oncological conditions, chronic diseases, and pediatric disorders, delivering substantial convenience and value for subsequent referrals and follow-up consultations.

  
  

• In addition, YZH Cloud has launched API interface services for third-party institutions. By calling the YZH Cloud open APIs, professional image viewing can be seamlessly integrated with existing business systems across platforms in a very short time. For example, companies engaged in operational services or product development—such as those in telemedicine, mobile healthcare, and medical education—can implement professional functionalities at a very low cost. Currently, YZH Cloud has already enabled API integration services for a mid-sized HIS vendor and a remote medical platform of a top-tier Grade 3A hospital in China.

  
  

The Foundation for the Research and Development of Intelligent Image Diagnostic Algorithms Is Being Gradually Improved

Finally, YZH Cloud has also proposed a solution for leveraging the accumulated data. In 2015, IBM acquired Merge Healthcare, a medical imaging software company, integrating it into its Watson Health research ecosystem, as imaging data plays a critical role in AI-driven diagnostic research. In addition to providing hospitals with imaging data storage and access services, YZH Cloud is committed to building a structured knowledge base for imaging diagnostics. It has already achieved intelligent structuring and standardization of large volumes of historical imaging diagnostic reports through smart semantic analysis. The combination of efficient processing capabilities for massive image data and the intelligent construction of a knowledge base will effectively accelerate the R&D progress of AI-based diagnostics. YZH Cloud is currently engaging in exchanges and collaborations with leading domestic imaging diagnostic institutions, experts, and algorithm scientists specializing in AI diagnostics, while also seeking venture capital investment to support the next phase of service promotion and R&D.