Imaging on the Cloud‪.‬

The forecast is cloudy with a good chance of performance improvements and meaningful connectivity. Sounds nebulous? Hardly so. Besides becoming the "phrase du jour," cloud computing, according to Merrill Lynch, is now a $95 billion market. (1) The potential to tap this promising platform and do more in medical imaging is more real and pressing than ever before. Cloud computing is defined as a menu of computation, software, data access, and storage services that does not require end-user knowledge of the physical location and configuration of the system that delivers the services. As is the case with certain technologies and "catch phrases" that are in vogue, the word "cloud" has been misused, confused, and abused all too often, causing us to roll our eyes every time a vendor even mentions the word. But the potential for cloud computing to make a tremendous impact in healthcare, and more so in imaging, begs for us to take a closer look at what it is and what it could be.