MR and PET image transfer
The PBTC neuroimaging studies are sent across a secure tunnel from the PBTC sites to the Operations, Biostatistics and Data Management Core (OBDMC) at St. Jude's Hospital and then to the Neuroimaging Center at Boston Children's Hospital. Software in the OBDMC Office is used to replace the patient identifiers with PBTC codes. It is important that the patient identifiers are stripped and replaced with PBTC codes at the Operations office, as it not only maintains patient confidentiality before the studies are sent to the Neuroimaging Center of the PBTC, it also provides us with the accountability to match correct patient data with the imaging studies.
Throughout the transmission process from the PBTC sites to the OBDMC and then onward to the Neuroimaging Center of PBTC, the OBDMC is employing a Virtual Private Network (VPN) solution. The data are highly encrypted and encapsulated in this secure tunnel. The OBDMC maintains a SFTP server, that is accessible via the VPN , to temporarily store DICOM files received from the sites and retrieved by the Neuroimaging Center. Standard security policies are employed on the SFTP server to ensure appropriate authentication, transmission encryption, and data protection with periodic system security monitoring and auditing capabilities of OBDMC secure servers.
MR and PET studies are downloaded from the OBDMC after email notification to the NIC. The NIC completes a web-based form to indicate that download is completed. The studies are sorted into the appropriate protocol folder on the NIC PC workstation and backed up to the PBTC NIC server.