Fig. 1.

At level 1 of the proposed classification scheme, the primary PACS viewing application and the advanced visualization/3D application are thick clients running on two separate workstations, with independent links to the imaging archive in the data center and/or direct connections to modalities (denoted M). Note that the 3D system in this case typically maintains its own local image archive, duplicating data, which also resides in the data center. Also note that image communication to the 3D workstation is typically achieved through DICOM transfer