4mm tapes

[YILDIRIM MUTAF]

Dear Pinnacle Users, 

First a disclaimer that I am not a pinnacle user and we don't use a pinnacle system for our clinical treatment planning. We inherited a pinnacle system when a sister center closed and would like to utilize this system to assess prior RT for the patients (ideally convert plans to DICOM and assess in a separate system like MIM). This system also has a lot of 4mm tapes used for archival. 

I am particularly worried about the long-term integrity of the tapes and would like to get the data out of the tapes to network drive that we can restore from an individual file (tar file, I believe). 

1) Is this possible? Can we just get the data out of the tapes, store them as individual files and restore in Pinnacle using these files? 

2) Is there a way to process these tapes and read them outside the pinnacle/unix system? Is there a drive and driver for a USB reader that we can connect to a windows file system? 

3) If we cannot use an alternative reader and have to use the SCSI reader connected to the pinnacle workstation, is there a way to get all of them read out without going through Pinnacle application? I am not sure if this is possible but if we have a few lines of unix commands needed to extract the data, we can write a batch script and assign an admin assistant to help us with processing of these 100s of tapes. 

Any help or recommendation is appreciated to ensure continuity of care to our patients. 

Thank you, 

Yildirim D. Mutaf

[Alistair]

Pinnacle can definitely restore patients directly from a file in an arbitrary location, and it's not too hard to do. Can you just give it a test run once? I don't know they would handle tape archiving differently with a combination of header and tar files.

I would be very surprised to learn that there was some way to extract the plans and convert to DICOM without writing your own code to do it. Pinnacle's file formatting is actually pretty parse-able but I expect you'd be spending 1000 hours coding something to save yourself hundreds of hours of restoring/exporting.