One for Chrizz.........

[X-ray]

"...For example the field of medical imaging either bans outright or strongly frowns on any form of lossy compression because artefacts introduced by the compression process can cause mis-diagnoses and in extreme cases even become life-threatening..."
-----------------------------------------------------------

If Vista has the ability to alter in any way the image on a PACS workstation, I can tell you now that it won't be the operating system used for that station.
You just need one missed micro-calcification on a mammogram and there will be lawsuits flying around (the hospital/NHS will be the entity paying damages). They are definitely not going to go for it, it is common sense and risk management.
A standard PACS monitor for viewing X-ray images is a 3k monitor. A mammogram-compliant monitor is 5k.

I would like to see them even try to justify using Vista for PACS networks. They could get away with it on a standalone machine like an operating theatre fluoroscopy unit, but not PACS.
Don't forget that PACS also handles audio (the dictated report) and video (such as cardiac imaging, barium studies and other motion sequences such as cine CT and 4D ultrasound). These workstations often have three monitors.

Sounds like a colossal balls-up to me.

[X-ray]

As far as I know, the PACS database in most cases is Unix-based. By this I mean the main server and the archive storage/retrieval cabinets.
The images are retrieved from the server and viewed on the PACS workstation, which at this point is Windows XP-based. That's where the diagnosis gets made, and that is the workstation that must have the diagnostic images viewed at their best resolution. In fact if the monitor doesn't have a minimum spec, it can't be used for reporting even if the image has not been degraded.
To give you an idea of the quality of the monitors, they are grayscale only but cost in the region of £20k for a pair, and they need their own graphics cards.
Can you imagine having such high quality displays but not being able to get 100% performance?
I can't see it happening.