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PMOD DICOM Functionality

DICOM

The DICOM standard has been established to facilitate data exchange between medical systems. It defines how the medical data must be encoded, and how they can be sent from an application on one computer to an application on a remote computer. DICOM basically consists of two components:

PMOD is able to act both as a DICOM client and a server.

Database for DICOM Data

The DICOM standard includes a description how DICOM data must be organized for off-line media such as CDs or DVDs. Basically, all the DICOM objects are stored in a directory tree, and a description of all stored studies must be written into a file called DICOMDIR at the root level of the directory tree. This approach is not suited for dynamically managed data, because the DICOMDIR file must be updated each time a study is removed or added, and because reading of the DICOMDIR is relatively slow.

To improve the performance when working with DICOM images, PMOD uses SQL databases to organize DICOM data access. The most important attributes of the DICOM objects like patient information, study and image descriptions as well as the file locations are stored in database tables. When the user needs to select image data, he is shown the information from the database tables which can very efficiently be searched and retrieved. After a study is selected, the file access information is immediately available to start the loading process.

DICOM Configuration

The configuration of the PMOD DICOM functionality is a part of the general PMOD configuration. It is opened by calling the

Users Button

button from the PMOD ToolBox, and selecting the DICOM tab in the appearing dialog window.

In This Chapter

DICOM Client Configuration

DICOM Server Configuration

DICOM Special Cases

DICOM Advanced Options

DICOM Query/Retrieve

DICOM Query Loader (Auxiliary Server)