At this year’s MEDICA, the world’s largest medical trade show that is being held in Düsseldorf, Germany (November 18 – 21), visitors to the Panasonic booth can have a closer look at the Advanced Disc for Archive. This new type of optical disc with a cassette-type shell case is an ideal solution for archiving data of pictures in the medical field.
The volume of archive data in the medical field has been drastically increasing due to the introduction of advanced modalities that generate higher definition or larger numbers of scanned pictures. In order to meet the requirements to archive these amounts of data securely, Panasonic has developed “Advanced Disc for Archive” (ADA). The storage medium is based on Panasonic’s advanced Blu-ray Disc technology and is thus an ideal successor for DVD-RAM with cartridge, which has been highly successful in the medical field.
ADA Media
The ADA utilizes Blue-violet laser with shorter wave length and can thus offer a high capacity of up to 50GB. In addition to a low error rate, these discs stand out through their use of phase change recording layers with inorganic materials, which makes long archive life possible. Panasonic test results show that expected archive life of ADA discs is more than 50 years at a room temperature of 25°C and relative humidity of 80%. Discs for ADA media are carefully screened by error rate specifications which are more critical than Blu-ray discs to assure reliability in data writing. Easy to handle cassette-type shell cases protect discs inside from scratches, dust and fingerprints, enhancing the reliability under critical environment in the field.
Two models of media with 50GB and 25GB data capacity are currently available. One 50GB media has more capacity than 10 pieces of 4.7GB DVDs or 71 pieces of 700MB CDs. ADA caters to the demand for archiving drastically increased numbers of scanned pictures brought by the progress of CT scanners. ADA also meets the requirement from the field to preserve RAW data from modalities to reduce the burden of repeated modality inspections of patients or to academic and scientific purposes.
ADA Drive
The ADA drive comes in two configurations: an external type with USB2.0 interface and an internal type with SATA interface. All drives directly write and read the disc stored in the cassette type shell case. Data transfer rate in reading is 72Mbps while verification works to assure reliability in writing. Internal drives can be installed vertically. The drives support writing and reading of not only ADA media but also Blu-ray disc, DVD-RAM, DVD-R and DVD-RW media. Reading of CDs is also supported. Panasonic maintains the infrastructure of long term and stable supply of products by utilizing Blu-ray disc technologies, while keeping compatibility with a variety of existing optical discs.
