We are a small software dev company and are developing an application to analyse CT images; we currently can pull those images from a PACS. We would like to install a freeware PACS and have images from the hospital PACS automatically get pushed to our PACS, we could then query that as needed as getting permissions to query the hospital PACS is limited. Do hospital PACS systems have the ability to do this and if so can you point me to where I can find out more information about this?
Thank you.
Hi CiarĂĄn,
Welcome to the group!
Yes, exactly as youâve described is possible, but it is rarely done in many countries with public healthcare systems like the UK & Australia (due to cost and risk of setting up the interfaces / firewall rules / security reasons / permissions etc.).
The most common way of achieving this kind of ad-hoc connection though is to use the Image Exchange Portal (IEP) as a transfer mechanism. Whatâs known as an auto-route can be set up on the sending modality youâre interested in by that hospital (e.g. the CT scanner mentioned) and all the images acquired would then send both normally to the local PACS and your own IEP dashboard.
If you connect your IEP dashboard to your own PACS then you would be able to have them transfer onwards onto that either manually (by selecting which images you would like to keep) or automatically (the whole study is transferred).
The IEP is considered to be a secure method of transfer and used by every acute hospital in the UK and also quite a few in Australia where you are, but all this would be subject to permissions and release from the originating institution as patients do not automatically consent to these kinds of commercial reuses of medical data.
As data transfer is basically a simple I.T. task, there are also many many many other 3rd party services, cloud offerings and applications which offer the same functionality at varying prices and degrees of security / complexity too.
Does that help or is there something more specific required in the transfers?
Al.
Hi CiarĂĄn⌠If youâre looking for âfreewareâ you may want to check out DCM4CHEE which can do all sorts of stuff like that. D4CHEE itself isn;t too difficult to get going with the community support (esp if you stick to Linux but thatâs my own opinion) but as Alexander has said - you may need to get your hands dirty with firewalls, encryption, etc
M
We are going to have our PACS on the same network so security connectivity shouldnât be a problem. Thanks for your help.
DCM4CHEE looks ideal, thanks.
There is also Orthanc:
We have a company that is looking into providing limited cloud based access to our imaging. They have one Orthanc Server inside the firewall and another on the cloud which are connected together. I believe the internal server connects to the PACS via a DICOM QR node. But as Alex says it was difficult to set up due to âthe risk of setting up the interfaces / firewall rules / security reasons / permissions etcâ.