Vinith Raj

Engineering reliable systems that help people do meaningful work.

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Articles

Agentic AI Series – Introduction

December 19, 2025 / Leave a Comment

Agentic AI has quickly become one of those terms that carries more weight than clarity. Depending on where you encounter it, it is either framed as the next inevitable step toward autonomous systems or dismissed as unnecessary complexity layered on top of language models. Both views miss the point. Agentic AI is neither magical nor … [Read more…]

Posted in: Agentic AI, Articles, Series, Systems Architecture Tagged: agentic ai, ai agents, ai infrastructure, ai system design, applied ai, distributed systems, llm orchestration, llm systems, microservices architecture, on-prem ai, software orchestration, systems architecture, workflow orchestration

From Schemaless DICOM Metadata to Clinician-Friendly Relational Tables in PostgreSQL

December 17, 2025 / Leave a Comment

Introduction In a previous article, we explored a zero-code approach to storing DICOM metadata by persisting vendor-specific and modality-specific tags as JSONB in an extradicomtags column. This approach embraces the reality of clinical imaging data: the schema is heterogeneous, nested, and constantly evolving. By storing the raw metadata as a JSON document and applying GIN … [Read more…]

Posted in: Articles, DICOM modeling, Healthcare Data Architecture, Medical Imaging Infrastructure, metadata, normalization, Research Computing Infrastructure, schemas Tagged: Clinical Data Engineering, Clinical Research Infrastructure, Data Platforms, Database Normalization, DICOM, DICOM Metadata, GIN Index, Healthcare Analytics, Healthcare IT, JSONB, Medical Data Platforms, Medical Imaging Data, PL/pgSQL, PostgreSQL, Radiation Oncology, Relational Schema Design, Research Computing, Research Data Systems, SQL Data Modeling

A Practical Architecture for Large-Scale Clinical Data Ingestion

December 14, 2025 / Leave a Comment

Clinical environments generate vast amounts of operational data from electronic medical records, oncology information systems, PACS archives, and imaging and treatment-planning platforms. This data has enormous value for research, AI model development, and quality improvement. Yet pulling this data from production systems in a form suitable for analysis is exceptionally difficult. The core challenge is … [Read more…]

Posted in: Articles Tagged: Architecture, Clinical Data Ingestion, Clinical Research Infrastructure, Data Engineering, Design, DICOM, Healthcare, Healthcare Data, Medical Imaging, Metadata Architecture, PostgreSQL JSONB, Research Computing