The vendor-neutral archive (VNA) market, which earned revenues of $110.5 million in 2011, is estimated to grow to $210 million in 2018, according to market research and consulting firm Frost & Sullivan.

The Mountain View, Calif.-based firm also projected the enterprise PACS archive market to grow to $168.2 million by 2018, up from $77.4 million in 2011.

“Providers no longer view the continuance of expanding monolithic and disparate image archives for each imaging department as a sustainable approach, as storage volume requirements for the diversifying imaging enterprise continue to increase exponentially,” Nadim Daher, Frost & Sullivan principal analyst, said in a release.

Daher pointed out that even though the growth in medical imaging procedure volumes has flattened in recent years, image data volumes continue to grow driven by increasing average study volumes, evolving regulatory guidelines and a reliance on imaging across the clinical enterprise.

“Our forecast model projects that even if diagnostic imaging volumes continue to plateau around the 600 million procedures per year mark, overall storage and archiving volume requirements for U.S. medical imaging data will cross the 1 exabyte mark by 2016. That is 1,000 petabytes or 1,000,000 terabytes, which marks medical imaging’s definitive entry into Big Data territory,” said Daher.

The VNA market consists of third-party vendors providing PACS-neutral archives, while the PACS archive market is largely comprised of incumbent PACS vendors. Double-digit growth rates in both markets will continue over the next seven years, according to Frost & Sullivan.

“Although they have been around for about 10 years, VNAs have been expanding only gradually into the marketplace – mostly following top-down expansion. However, market adoption is accelerating with the major PACS vendors moving more decisively and proactively into enterprise archives,” said Daher.