Fig. 2.

At the second level of the scheme, both the primary PACS application and the 3D application consist of thick clients, running on a single client machine. In this scenario, a custom-built link (dotted line) between specific products (typically determined by vendor partnership agreements) allows the 3D application to be launched using context information from the PACS application. Users are constrained by the integration options offered by specific vendors. Aside from context-based launching, the applications remain separate, with their own interfaces. The separate, duplicated network transfers of image data from the data center to the 3D application, which were required in level 1 (Fig. 1), are eliminated here