An Agent-Based Infrastructure for Secure Medical Imaging System Integration

This research examines the weaknesses of the trusted models applied on the domain of medical image sharing between PACS (Picturing Archiving and Communication System) and image-enabled EHR (Electronic Health Record) systems. In this paper, we propose an agent-based infrastructure in legacy PACS systems to integrate them regardless of vendors, with a common infrastructure that we proposed in our earlier work. The proposed architecture allows for capturing PACS communication messages, identifying users, extracting user actions to feed into an action-based access control mechanism, and integrating with modern authentication and authorization technologies (OpenID and OAuth). We also provide a UML model for the patient consent directives to allow for systematic enforcement of their impact on the proposed access control technique. Finally, we implemented a prototype of the proposed architecture using open source tools to demonstrate the feasibility and extendibility of our proposed solution.