Care in Every Scan: Nanjing Brain Hospital Opens a New Chapter in Smart Imaging with Huawei Storage

Nanjing Brain Hospital continues to uphold a reputation for medical excellence. Since its establishment in 1947 (nearly 80 years of history), it has grown into a comprehensive healthcare center integrating medical treatment, rehabilitation, scientific research, and education. As a leading regional center for mental health, the hospital specializes in the research and treatment of neurological, psychiatric, and thoracic diseases. It also plays an irreplaceable role in responding to major urban healthcare demands and public health emergencies.

Nanjing Brain Hospital is committed to safeguarding diagnostic and treatment efficiency and enhancing patient experience. To fulfill this commitment in the face of the growing demands of smart healthcare and surging imaging data, the hospital has adopted Huawei's New-Gen OceanStor Dorado Converged All-Flash Storage. This solution modernizes the hospital's data infrastructure to enable faster transfer of image data and more precise diagnosis and treatment.

The Invisible Constraints on Medical Imaging

Nanjing Brain Hospital operates across two campuses—neurology and thoracic—with nearly 2,000 beds. It handles around 1.2 million outpatient visits and close to 50,000 inpatient admissions each year. Medical imaging plays a critical role in the hospital's precision diagnosis and treatment.

Often described as a second pair of eyes for doctors, imaging underpins critical care across the hospital, from precision neurosurgery and lung cancer screening to rapid decision-making during stroke emergencies. Imaging devices like high-precision CT and MRI continue to evolve rapidly, spurring the exponential growth of data generated at Nanjing Brain Hospital. A high-precision spiral CT device can generate over one thousand images in one thoracic examination.

PACS (medical imaging system) data volumes are surging and daily high-concurrency access to clinical and research data has become routine. This puts a strain on Nanjing Brain Hospital's existing data infrastructure, forming an invisible constraint on smart imaging.

When a thoracic surgeon loads a patient's CT scan in a lung cancer screening clinic, a spinning loading icon is more than a technical delay. It disrupts the clinician's workflow and increases the patient's anxiety. For stroke emergencies, the stakes are even higher—a race against time. Any delay in data access can have irreversible consequences: for every minute lost, about 1.9 million neurons die. No advanced medical equipment can make up for the time lost in these critical moments. Data must be able to flow seamlessly across departments like blood through the body. Otherwise, data silos turn into departmental walls that hinder multidisciplinary collaboration and limit the depth of clinical insight.

The causes of these issues are clear: outdated storage architecture and aging devices result in long PACS loading times and bottlenecks in image access efficiency. At the same time, the sheer volume of data makes long-term archiving increasingly expensive. More critically, different file types and access protocols create barriers to data sharing and service convergence.

Change is no longer just an option, but an imperative.

High-Speed Image Access with All-Flash Storage

To bridge the gap between aging infrastructure and ever-growing service demands, Nanjing Brain Hospital has taken a decisive step. It is using Huawei's New-Gen OceanStor Dorado Converged All-Flash Storage to build a modern data foundation—one that serves as a digital engine to power precision diagnosis and treatment.

With the deployment of this solution alongside OceanStor Pacific scale-out storage, the hospital has created an intelligent, tiered storage architecture for its mass data. Think of it as a "smart traffic hub". This hub automatically prioritizes data into three lanes based on access frequency: hot, warm, and cold. The most recent and frequently accessed image data is stored on the high-performance all-flash storage system, enabling doctors to open images instantly, whether in outpatient settings, wards, or even operating rooms. This ensures a truly seamless image access experience. As time passes, less frequently accessed images are automatically migrated to the larger-capacity, more cost-efficient storage tier. There, advanced compression ensures long-term data retention without compromising image quality.

While data tiering enables both speed and cost efficiency for image data storage at Nanjing Brain Hospital, OceanStor Dorado Converged All-Flash Storage enables further innovation by providing a unified, converged data resource pool that acts as a versatile toolbox.

With this toolbox, every workload has native support: high-speed block access for HIS databases, seamless file sharing for departmental collaboration, and large-capacity archiving for research data. With this unified, converged data resource pool, thoracic surgeons can quickly retrieve patients' neurological scans for diagnosis, researchers can analyze de-identified clinical data directly without endless data copying, and the barriers between departments disappear, enabling efficient service collaboration and multidisciplinary consultations at any time.

Today, powered by OceanStor Dorado Converged All-Flash Storage, Nanjing Brain Hospital has significantly improved PACS image loading and processing, accelerating diagnosis and clinical decision-making. At the same time, the solution reduces the long-term costs of massive data storage, which will help the hospital handle future data growth with ease. More importantly, the solution meets the diverse data service needs of different departments, laying a solid foundation for efficient collaboration across departments.

A New Chapter in Smart Imaging

With the rollout of its next-generation data infrastructure, Nanjing Brain Hospital has stepped into a new era of smart imaging.

This is more than a leap in efficiency. It is the meeting point of cutting-edge technology and profound human care—where every improvement reflects the utmost respect for life itself.

In a hospital with nearly 80 years of history, generations of doctors have pressed forward in the long journey of brain and thoracic sciences. Empowered by Huawei OceanStor storage, the hospital's commitment now takes on new momentum. Smooth data mobility carries healthcare insights faster and farther, while intelligent data capabilities elevate precision to new heights, helping safeguard every life and brighten every glimmer of hope.