Archiving of source data

At the conference on PACS and regional data exchanged organized by MedicalPHIT at Papendal, the Netherlands, dr. den Heeten presented on why to archive source data. Storing all source data produced by all modalities would be extremely difficult and expensive. However, This presentation had its focus on mammography screening. Each mammogram is first processed into the human interpretable format. These processed images are stored into the archive. However, the original images are better for computer processing and computer aided detection.
To achieve this they want to start using a Vendor Neutral Archive for storage of the original, raw, mammography data for research.
Den Heeten claims that using the raw data can optimize the current breast cancer screening and allow for a more individualized, patient-centered, screening.