A centralized PACS has a central archive around which all modalities and workstations are attached. This architecture allows equal access to the entire PACS. However, on a very large system, access can be slowed by one or more slow components (e.g., deep archive search). Although this architecture may include pre-fetching from the deep archive to the short-term archive, it does not require that the pre-fetch go to a specific workstation or distributed server