Overview

The OptosAdvance Data Lifecycle Management (DLM) service uses a policy-based approach to manage DICOM data throughout its lifecycle, from initial storage to the time when the data becomes obsolete and needs to be recycled.

Data lifecycle policies are authored by OptosAdvance administrators using a special editor. A data lifecycle policy contains a rule and one or more activities.

• The policy rule contains conditions that must be satisfied in order for a policy to be applied to a series. Conditions are defined in terms of attributes associated with the DICOM data, such as the data origin, user group/account, and DICOM header tags (for example: modality, image type, body part).
• The policy activities specify various operations to be applied to a DICOM series throughout its lifecycle. Activities may include retention periods, routing to external DICOM nodes (PACS or workstations), data transitions between storage tiers, data transcoding, and administrator notifications.

When DICOM data is initially stored in OptosAdvance, the DLM service tries to match the data to a data lifecycle policy. If a matching policy is found, the DICOM series is associated with the policy and is tracked by the DLM service, which then applies the policy activities to the series at the scheduled times. You can track the data lifecycle of a series using the Data Lifecycle dashboard. The dashboard can also be used to address failures by correcting the lifecycle activities for a series.

This handbook provides hands-on exercises and examples for authoring and managing OptosAdvance data lifecycle policies. This handbook also contains a reference section with definitions for lifecycle policy rules and activities.