MTL Mammo-5mt: Tomograms stopped transferring to the workstations
What happened
Tomograms stopped transferring from the detector to the technologist workstation and the reading physician, while plain images were still acquired and sent normally.
What was checked
- Ruled out a detector or network fault: plain images still reached the workstations, so acquisition and the transfer path were partly working.
- Checked free space on the system disk of the workstation handling the transfer.
- Went through the temporary folders and found a large backlog of leftover files, including detector dark frames — reported in the case as roughly two years of accumulation.
Cause
The engineers found the system disk full of temporary files — mostly detector dark frames that stayed on disk because the automatic cleanup setting in the detector configuration had never been enabled. Tomogram series are far larger than plain images, so the overflowing disk hit them first.
What was done
The engineers freed space on the system disk by deleting the accumulated temporary files, and tomogram transfer returned to normal. To prevent a repeat, the detector configuration was corrected so temporary dark frames are removed automatically after each exposure — a procedure from the manufacturer's service documentation, done by authorised personnel.
Safety
Power the system down and follow the manufacturer's isolation steps before working on the detector or the acquisition workstation, and verify image transfer together with the scheduled QC tests before returning the mammograph to clinical use.
Lesson: When only the largest data sets stop transferring, suspect a full disk before blaming the network or the detector.
Covered in the course: Mammography Service — Level 2: Fault-Finding →
Written from an anonymised case shared by service engineers. It is not a manufacturer instruction and grants no authorisation. Independent note; names are trademarks of their owners.