The invention relates to a method, an apparatus and a system for the
transfer of medical image data from at least one source application to at
least one sink application, and for managing the data transfer via a
controller and a message system. The method is based on a pipeline
mechanism that comprises various processing stages, a requester and a
serializer controller that controls the data steam to be transferred. The
pipeline mechanism comprises a serializer that decomposes the data stream
in individual chunks or reassembles the decomposed chunks to form a data
stream, and a carrier that is responsible for the physical data
transmission. Moreover, the pipeline can also comprise a converter and a
manipulator that respectively execute conversions and manipulations on
the data.