ULTRA HIGH-SPEED STORAGE FOR MINIMALLY INVASIVE IMAGING

THE OFFEROR PROPOSES TO DEVELOP A SYSTEM FOR RAPID STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL OF VERY LARGE QUANTITIES OF DIGITAL IMAGE DATASUCH AS MIGHT BE FOUND IN THE NEXT GENERATION OF DIGITAL SUBTRACTED-ANGIOGRAPHY SYSTEMS DESIGNED FOR MINIMALLY INVAS-IVE IMAGING OF THE CORONARY ARTERIES OR OTHER DEEP ARTERIES.THE IMAGE MASS-STORAGE SYSTEM IS TO BE CONSTRUCTED BY INTER-FACING AN ARRAY OF LATEST GENERATION, PARALLEL TRANSFER COMPUTER DISKS TO A VERY HIGH BANDWIDTH DATA ACQUISITION ANDCOMPUTER INTERCONNECTION BUS (THE "FASTBUS," IEEE STANDARD 960) DEVELOPED BY THE NATIONAL BUREAU OF STANDARDS TO MEET THE SUBSTANTIAL COMPUTING NEEDS OF EXPERIMENTS IN ELEMENTARYPARTICLE PHYSICS. THE RESULTANT DATA ACQUISITION AND STORAGE SYSTEM FEATURES DATA TRANSPORT APPROXIMATELY 16 TIMES FASTER AND DATA STORAGE AT LEAST 4 TIMES FASTER THAN THE CURRENT GENERATION OF 30 FRAME/SECOND, 512 X 512 PIXEL/ FRAME DIGITAL RADIOGRAPHY SYSTEMS JUST BECOMING COMERCIALLY AVAILABLE. IT IS EXPECTED THAT FASTBUS TECHNOLOGY COULD BE RAPIDLY INTEGRATED INTO COMMERCIAL RADIOGRAPHY SYSTEMS ONCE INCREASES IN FRAMING RATE, SPATIAL RESOLUTION, AND/OR VIDEO SIGNAL TO NOISE RATIOS WARRANT SUCH ENHANCEMENTS IN THE PERFORMANCE REQUIREMENTS OF IMAGE STORAGE SYSTEMS.