One of my doctors wants to build a PC for running unspecified medical applications etc.
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One of my doctors wants to build a PC for running unspecified medical applications etc.
What follows is a collection of info I aim to email to my doctor who wants to build a PC for running medical applications etc.
Being clueless about what such a rig should entail (beyond having a multi-core SoC, ECC RAM and pro graphics), I'm hoping for some experienced suggestions and insights from the learned members of the LinuxQuestions forum vis-à-vis known-good software and hardware match-ups as employed in industry.
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CHOOSING A PRO GRADE COMPUTER FOR THOSE WITH LESS TIME THAN MONEY
These links will give you an idea of what to look for in a professional computer builder:
Prepare a list of your intended applications and tasks then send prospective PC builders an email for a consultation.
BTW. Puget Systems' site has a lot of free articles and near-yearly most reliable hardware lists on offer.
The currently preferred workstation hardware platform due to its top-shelf performance (pending confirmation of compatibility with the applications you intend using).
Appropriately configured, such a system is a beast that can tackle a wide range of resource intensive computing tasks.
CHOOSING A USED PRO GRADE COMPUTER FOR THOSE WITH LESS MONEY THAN TIME
Use an older, Intel Xeon and ECC RAM-based Dell Precision Workstation running Ubuntu (or one of its derivatives such as Linux Mint) and Open Source medical software as a means of gaining first hand experience.
Later on, the Dell can be re-tasked to perform other more common household PC chores.
What's available on Dell Refurbished at any given time varies and, IIRC, there's an optional 1 year warranty.
NOTE:
64-bit Windows 10 and recent Ubuntu and Redhat releases will run on these older machines (for which Dell offers complete technical documentation, UEFI and firmware updates and Windows 10 drivers). However, they may not run Windows 11 well or at all.
Customer testimonials should be of use in evaluating professionally built computer systems, given that the interference of poorly researched and impatient computer neophytes is not a factor.
As well, a YouTube search of an older machine's make & model number usually results in a number of pertinent upgrade or dismantling videos of varying usefulness.
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SOFTWARE
I'm guessing that DICOM would form part of your intended use case.
What is DICOM used for
DICOM is the international standard to communicate and manage medical images and data. Its mission is to ensure the interoperability of systems used to produce, store, share, display, send, query, process, retrieve and print medical images, as well as to manage related workflows.
Medical applications I've seen tend not to be CPU-bound. They lean towards wanting RAID storage and high-res graphics for storing, manipulating and viewing images. In medical research, some applications either specify the platform or provide it with the software, eg. 3d image reconstruction from CAT scans. If you are just looking at office software, the demands are not high at all. The emphasis needs to be on backups and redundancy.
It's not clear what exactly you are looking for. Your post reads like an ad.
Your post reads like a Request For Proposal. It would take an IT professional at least two weeks of work to come up with such a RFP. Therefore I think the doctor will have to pay some professional to provide him with a report like you are asking for. As an alternative he could ask a sales rep for a company which sells such applications as a hardware/software bundle for a proposal.
If you are willing to help the doctor, either paid or unpaid, then you could contact two different such application providers and send your RFP to both.
Before I would agree to advise someone about computer resources, I would have to know a LOT more specific information about their normal use, applications and application requirements, and projected use over the next five years at least.
Just saying "medical applications" tells one nothing about the resource requirements.
Agree with all of the above; saying "medical applications" is incredibly vague. And if you're the one doing a proposal (you say you're emailing it to your doctor), I'd not click SEND. Because if I asked you for a proposal and you sent me links to duckduckgo, and a list of software for ME to research, I'd wonder why I was paying you, to be honest, when you're asking me to do the research.
The better way is to get them to tell you what they have, and get their needs/wants met. You scale the hardware and software to match that. If this is new ground for them (for example, if they're just now getting into in-house imaging), get demo systems of several packages for them to work with, so they can tell you which is the best fit. Their needs are going to drive your recommendations.
MIJ-VI- from my point of view - I do not think Linux is a relevant platform for daily work in the medical business. Much sensible information is now cloud based protected behind e.g. O2 authentication with confirmation of login via an app on the phone, or a fingerprint thumb stick.
As everything now is computerised there is huge problems on days when the system is down, and everything then rely on professional IT support.
Until a few years ago information and files still was stored on local PC's where I remember crooks some years back broke into the office of a GP colleauge of mine and stole his computer - embarrassing, and pure evil!!.
"Everything" in the medical business has been Microsoft based in those places I have been employed as a doctor (Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Greenland).
GIMP will work with FITS files known from astronomy, I believe also MR imagery is saved in this format. Audacity is fine for audio. OpenOffice / Softmaker Free Office are good MS office alternatives, and your Linux Mint excellent after what I have heard.
Agree with all of the above; saying "medical applications" is incredibly vague. And if you're the one doing a proposal (you say you're emailing it to your doctor), I'd not click SEND. Because if I asked you for a proposal and you sent me links to duckduckgo, and a list of software for ME to research, I'd wonder why I was paying you, to be honest, when you're asking me to do the research.
The better way is to get them to tell you what they have, and get their needs/wants met. You scale the hardware and software to match that. If this is new ground for them (for example, if they're just now getting into in-house imaging), get demo systems of several packages for them to work with, so they can tell you which is the best fit. Their needs are going to drive your recommendations.
If you get to talk to the doctor, make sure to talk to his primary nurse as well. If this is for his office, the nurse may know or notice things the doctor never would.
(This from a guy that worked IT and networking for a hospital and medical clinic for 11 years.)
If you get to talk to the doctor, make sure to talk to his primary nurse as well. If this is for his office, the nurse may know or notice things the doctor never would.
(This from a guy that worked IT and networking for a hospital and medical clinic for 11 years.)
And the technicians and secretaries, etc, who might also be using the systems on that hardware. Too often these tenders end up as a solution in search of a problem.
Some more points
1. If you have to include m$ systems in the tender, be sure to acquire and print out all the relevant licenses. Each version, and sometimes each update, comes with a separate proprietary license with changed conditions. Take a highlighter and a red pen to the printout and highlight the scores of paragraphs there where HIPAA is straight up violated. M$ and its flunkies don't make getting the licenses an easy task since they show in black and white trouble that non-technical lawyers can understand, if they choose to, and thus eliminate it from consideration. The corresponding bundle from a GNU/Linux deployment will be only a handful of licenses (since they are re-used) and amount to a few dozen pages.
2. Along those lines, if you think you can do it without endangering yourself or your family, find out what official channels there are to report severe problems caused by deployment of m$ products, such as deaths, without the reporter risking their career.
3. Migration and exit costs are included in the total cost of ownership in an increasing number of jurisdictions so the tender should heavily favor open standards and even free and open source software.
4. Speaking of free and open source, that label is not trademarked but you might want to be more specific about what you mean by it and spell it out instead. The reason that is important is because it is forbidden to require specific brands or trademarks.
Thank you everyone for offering your insight on IT in the health care industry, a subject which I know nothing about.
Given the dearth of technical info supplied to me, I scrambled to come up with something of interest to my doctor acquaintance who seems to currently be a computer novice bent upon doing his first DIY build in order to have a competent machine able to review work related documents and pursue his personal interests. On that second point, he has frequently mentioned OpenAI's ChatGPT.
I will email him a link to this thread so that he may read for himself the degree of IT exactitude and defined scope of his ambition which he must provide in order to elicit any actionable course in realizing his aims.
At this point, I've yet to even find out which OS type and version he is familiar with, the names and version numbers of the applications he intends to run nor his budget.
In spite of that, I emailed him the following parts list intended to inform and educate.
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CPU
(Chosen for its performance, high core count and Windows 11 support)
I have confirmed the latest stable release of Ubuntu 20.04.3 LTS (Focal Fossa) Desktop successfully installs and operates under default conditions. All on-board feature sets have been tested to function correctly out of the box. No BIOS update was required prior to installation of the AMD Ryzen 5000 Series CPU.
NVMe SSDs are faster for linear file copying but consume 4 PCIe lanes and don't do much for a PC's responsiveness (see the supplimental video and links below)
IME, Crucial's MX500 series of SATA SSDs have thus far proven to be performant and reliable. Get 2 x the 2TB model at minimum. The 4TB model is better in the long run:
Conventional Magnetic Recording (CMR) drives write data on a hard disk in tracks that do not overlap. Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) allows tracks to overlap, which results in higher data densities, but slower read and write times compared to CMR drives.
IME, Segate's Iron Wolf Pro series of NAS HDDs (many of which still use Conventional Magnet Recording, thank God) are decent, 24/7-rated units with built-in anti-vibration features. Bigger is better in the long run.
The proposed settlement comes after widespread criticism from WD's customers about its*surreptitious use of slower shingled magnetic recording (SMR) technology*in some of its hard drives without disclosing that fact in marketing materials or specification sheets. Notably, this settlement is only proposed for one of the multiple litigation actions against Western Digital on the matter.
Thank you everyone for offering your insight on IT in the health care industry, a subject which I know nothing about.
Given the dearth of technical info supplied to me, I scrambled to come up with something of interest to my doctor acquaintance who seems to currently be a computer novice bent upon doing his first DIY build in order to have a competent machine able to review work related documents and pursue his personal interests. On that second point, he has frequently mentioned OpenAI's ChatGPT.
I will email him a link to this thread so that he may read for himself the degree of IT exactitude and defined scope of his ambition which he must provide in order to elicit any actionable course in realizing his aims.
At this point, I've yet to even find out which OS type and version he is familiar with, the names and version numbers of the applications he intends to run nor his budget.
In spite of that, I emailed him the following parts list intended to inform and educate.
As someone who has been in consulting for quite a while, I can tell you that you've made your task 1000% harder.
His mentioning the ChatGPT isn't surprising....because folks who aren't in the tech field hear a buzzword and read a fluff article about how great it is, and that's all they can think about (for about 2 months). Then it's on to the next shiny thing. And while your efforts to educate him are laudable...you have not. They're not going to trawl through all that and (if they do), they're going to pepper you with 1,000 questions a day about EVERY TOPIC, along the lines of:
"Hey, I heard that NVME is a LOT better than SATA! What's the difference? Are you SURE we want xxxxx?"
"How about dual power supplies? I read something about something saying that's good...can we....?"
<REPEAT AD-INFINITUM>
Until someone can clearly define what they want/need, you cannot deliver it, period. If you're getting paid to do this, then you need to grind it, and talk to the affected parties at the office. Find out what they use now, and ask clearly if they like it. Find out what hardware they have now. Address things like backups and other tasks they may not think of. Tell them to CLEARLY define what new things they want.
Until you know, throwing internet links at them and telling them to go look it up and read isn't going to help. They have their own jobs; when you take your car to the mechanic, do they email you a list of links with reviews of different oils/greases, or sites about ball-joints or gear ratios?? And if they did...would you spend how many hours reading and 'educating' yourself, or would you just want them to fix your car??? Do YOU have time to do all that research, or would you want someone who knows to advise you???
Thank you everyone for offering your insight on IT in the health care industry, a subject which I know nothing about.
Given the dearth of technical info supplied to me, I scrambled to come up with something of interest to my doctor acquaintance who seems to currently be a computer novice bent upon doing his first DIY build in order to have a competent machine able to review work related documents and pursue his personal interests. On that second point, he has frequently mentioned OpenAI's ChatGPT.
I will email him a link to this thread so that he may read for himself the degree of IT exactitude and defined scope of his ambition which he must provide in order to elicit any actionable course in realizing his aims.
At this point, I've yet to even find out which OS type and version he is familiar with, the names and version numbers of the applications he intends to run nor his budget.
In spite of that, I emailed him the following parts list intended to inform and educate.
Thanks again,
Gary
You seem to be assuming the role of a consultant. As a consultant YOUR first task is finding out where the customer is with what they already have, what they think they want, and then doing the research to make a reasonable recommendation.
What you have told us is that you have done little or no research so do not even know how to narrow down the recommendation.
Giving someone with no technical experience a grab bag of parts is equivalent to turning a kid loose in a candy store. Everything looks good but the result is nothing short of a nightmare as noted by TBOne above.
It is the consultants job to consult with the customer and determine the wants and needs (which often are not the same) then present the recommendation to meet the needs. Please do your job and research the task.
Last edited by computersavvy; 12-22-2022 at 09:49 AM.
If this system is in any way "patient care critical", such as holding patient records, doing any form of monitoring, etc. then having one built by some randomer that has a parts "wish list" is (imho):
Warning: An Extremely Bad Idea
Anything of that nature should be from a known manufacturer and with an on-site warranty.
Unless there's a compelling software reason, I wouldn't consider using linux as the OS if there's any medical imaging involved. Even a quick look on this forum shows driver issues (especially with graphics cards) when there's updates to most of the popular distributions. This happens to a lesser extent when running / updating Windows.
If this system is in any way "patient care critical", such as holding patient records, doing any form of monitoring, etc. then having one built by some randomer that has a parts "wish list" is (imho):
Warning: An Extremely Bad Idea
Anything of that nature should be from a known manufacturer and with an on-site warranty.
Unless there's a compelling software reason, I wouldn't consider using linux as the OS if there's any medical imaging involved. Even a quick look on this forum shows driver issues (especially with graphics cards) when there's updates to most of the popular distributions. This happens to a lesser extent when running / updating Windows.
You should take into consideration the commercial distributions such as Red Hat and SuSE. They can easily out compete Microsft in running critical applications.
You should take into consideration the commercial distributions such as Red Hat and SuSE. They can easily out compete Microsft in running critical applications.
I agree 100%. These server distros are intended to be stable and rock solid for long term use.
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