With AWS HealthImaging, you pay only for what you use. You are charged based on the amount of data you store and access. There are three HealthImaging cost components to consider when managing your data—storage pricing, request pricing, and data transfer pricing. You are billed for all the information in your data stores. HealthImaging stores image data, metadata, and imaging-related data in image sets, which helps you index medical images stored in the Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) format for easy querying.
Storage Pricing
When you store data in a HealthImaging data store, you pay for the object storage of DICOM data and and the structured storage of DICOM metadata. All data imported to HealthImaging is charged for a minimum storage duration of 30 days. Data imports into HealthImaging are always free. You also pay for API operations.
All Data Storage
You are charged for the storage of imported DICOM objects per gigabyte per month in two tiers. The storage rate charged per image set depends on the size of the image set, duration of storage, and storage tier. In some but not all cases, HealthImaging transcodes data with optimized, lossless compression, and storage rates are billed based on data sizes after compression.
Each image set is billed at a minimum size of 5 MB. HealthImaging accepts image sets smaller than 5 MB, but these smaller objects are charged at a 5 MB rate.
HealthImaging storage usage is calculated in binary gigabytes, where 1 GB is 230 bytes. This unit of measurement is also known as a gibibyte, defined by the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC). Similarly, 1 TB is 240 bytes, which is 1,024 GB.
Intelligent Tiering for Medical Imaging
HealthImaging provides automatic cost savings for medical imaging data with unknown or changing access patterns with Intelligent Tiering, which manages the lifecycle of your DICOM data between the two tiers of storage.
All data is imported to the Frequent Access tier. Data that has not been accessed for 30 consecutive days will automatically be moved to the Archive Instant Access tier. Data is moved back to the Frequent Access tier (or accessed) after being retrieved by an API call that qualifies as an access.
There are no data retrieval charges with HealthImaging and no additional charges apply when objects are moved between storage tiers. Both tiers of storage offer millisecond access latencies to data. All data is available to stream with no penalty to latency. See HealthImaging Documentation for more details.
API Operations
You also pay for requests made against your data stores and image sets. When you use the HealthImaging console to browse your data stores, you incur charges for requests made to facilitate browsing. Charges accrue at the same rate as requests made using the AWS SDK.
Structured Data Storage
HealthImaging stores some metadata attributes for search queries. You are charged per gigabyte per month for the total metadata elements indexed in a given data store. Each data store comes pre-provisioned with 10 GB of structured storage.
Contact Us for workloads with a high number of data stores or indexed storage greater than 100 GB per month.
Data Transfer
You pay for all bandwidth out of HealthImaging. Data transfer fees do not apply to data transferred to any AWS services within the same AWS Region as the data store. The following pricing is based on data transferred in and out of HealthImaging (over the public internet).
If the Data Transfer per month is greater than 500 TB / month, please contact us.
Rate tiers take into account your aggregate usage for Data Transfer Out to the Internet across Amazon EC2, Amazon S3, Amazon Glacier, Amazon RDS, Amazon Redshift, Amazon SageMaker, Amazon SES, Amazon SimpleDB, Amazon SQS, Amazon SNS, Amazon DynamoDB, AWS Storage Gateway, AWS CloudShell, and Amazon CloudWatch Logs.
AWS customers receive 100 GB of free data transfer out to the internet free each month, aggregated across all AWS Services and Regions (except China and GovCloud).
Learn more about AWS Direct Connect pricing for data transferred in and out.
AWS Free Tier
As part of the AWS Free Tier, you can get started with HealthImaging for free. Upon sign-up, new AWS customers receive 20 GB per month of HealthImaging storage—with up to 10 GB in both Frequent Access and Archive Instant Access tiers—and 20,000 API requests each month.
Your usage for the Free Tier is calculated each month across all Regions (except the AWS GovCloud (US) Regions) and is automatically applied to your bill; unused monthly usage will not roll over. Restrictions apply; see offer terms for more details.
Pricing Examples
The following examples are based on usage in US East (N. Virginia).
Example 1: Clinical scenario
A healthcare provider imports new clinical images to HealthImaging from their modalities at the point of care. A new image set on average is 100 MB after import. These image sets are imported to the Frequent Access tier, are immediately read by clinicians, and remain in the Frequent Access tier for 30 days before moving to the Archive Instant Access tier. Over the course of 5 years, these image sets remain in the Archive Instant Access tier and are each accessed twice, on average, as a clinical prior, where they transition to the Frequent Access storage class for 30 days. Each image set is subject to 200 total API requests over 5 years. The total cost over 5 years for each image set is as follows:
Frequent Access storage: $0.105 per GB / month * 100 MB per image set / 1,024 * 3 months = $0.0308
Archive Instant Access storage: $0.006 per GB / month * 100 MB per image set / 1,024 * 57 months = $0.0334
API requests: $0.005 / 1,000 API calls * 200 API calls = $0.001
Total cost for 5 years: $0.0652 per image set
Example 2: Heavy reads on big data
A research organization wants to make a de-identified data set available to clinicians for 3 months to facilitate labeling and annotation for AI/ML training. They want to serve the data to a labeling tool with HealthImaging APIs. They import 1,000 image sets to HealthImaging. The data are all 3D volumes and the average image set size is 250 MB after import. The data remains in the Frequent Access tier because the image set content is interacted with daily. Each image set is subject to 20,000 API requests in each month. The total cost over the 3 months is as follows:
Total data imported: 250 MB * 1,000 image sets / 1,024 = 244.14 GB
Frequent Access storage: $0.105 per GB / month * 244.14 GB * 3 months = $76.90
API requests: $0.005 / 1,000 API calls * 20,000 API calls * 3 months = $0.30
Total cost for 3 months: $77.20
Example 3: Monthly bill for archive migration
A healthcare provider moves a 20 TB archive of medical image data to HealthImaging, and stores it for a minimum of 2 years. After import, the image sets are stored in the Frequent Access tier for 30 days. No API calls access the image sets after import, so all image sets automatically move to the Archive Instant Access tier of storage on the 31st day. These image sets are not accessed over 5 years, and remain in the Archive Instant Access tier. The pricing per GB does not change during this time. The the storage cost over two years is as follows:
First month: $0.105 per GB / month * (1,024 GB / TB * 20 TB) = $2,150.40 in the first month
All other months: $0.006 per GB / month * (1,024 GB / TB * 20 TB) = $122.88 per month
Total cost for first year: 1 month * $2,150.40 / month + 11 months * $122.88 / month = $3,502.08
Total cost for second year: 12 months * $122.88 per month = $1,474.56
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