ITKv4 DICOM Communications Discussion

From KitwarePublic
Revision as of 15:14, 5 August 2010 by Wryan mayo (talk | contribs) (Added brief explanations to the Service Class bullets.)
Jump to navigationJump to search

Use this page to discuss and capture scenarios for using DICOM Query/Retrieve (Q/R) to load images from source (PACS) systems.

Scenarios

  • User wants to query a PACS system for a particular series. The user only knows the Patient ID, Date of Exam and Series Description to look for. Ultimately, the user wants this loaded in memory as an ITK Image object.

Standards

Most of the documentation for Verification, Storage and Query/Retrieve functionality can be found in Part 4 of the DICOM Standard.

Toolkits

  • GDCM is currently used for DICOM File I/O. At this time it does not support the communications aspects of DICOM, such as StoreSCU/StoreSCP, C-FIND, C-MOVE, etc. Are there plans to add this functionality to GDCM?
  • DCMTK contains the code needed for DICOM communications. It is currently not integrated into the ITK toolkit. Should it be?

Service Classes

Verification

The Verification class uses the C-ECHO service to verify that an endpoint is alive and accepting DICOM requests. This is similar to a ping request for TCP/IP.

Storage

The C-STORE service is used to store DICOM images. To receive images, the system is set up as a Service Class Provider (SCP). The device sending the images is set up as a C-STORE Service Class User (SCU).

Query/Retrieve

The Query/Retrieve (Q/R) class is used to find images on a server and request them to be sent to a destination.

For an explanation of how to use DICOM to query a PACS, please see this page: DICOM_QueryRetrieve_Explained