Rui Lebre

Rui Lebre, Eduardo Pinho, Jorge Miguel Silva et al.

One of the most noticeable trends in healthcare over the last years is the continuous growth of data volume produced and its heterogeneity. In the medical imaging field, the evolution of digital systems is supported by the PACS concept and the DICOM standard. These technologies are deeply grounded in medical laboratories, supporting the production and providing healthcare practitioners with the ability to set up collaborative work environments with researchers and academia to study and improve healthcare practice. However, the complexity of those systems and protocols makes difficult and time-consuming to prototype new ideas or develop applied research, even for skilled users with training in those environments. Dicoogle emerges as a reference tool to achieve those objectives through a set of resources aggregated in the form of a learning pack. It is an open-source PACS archive that, on the one hand, provides a comprehensive view of the PACS and DICOM technologies and, on the other hand, provides the user with tools to easily expand its core functionalities. This paper describes the Dicoogle framework, with particular emphasis in its Learning Pack package, the resources available and the impact of the platform in research and academia. It starts by presenting an overview of its architectural concept, the most recent research backed up by Dicoogle, some remarks obtained from its use in teaching, and worldwide usage statistics of the software. Moreover, a comparison between the Dicoogle platform and the most popular open-source PACS in the market is presented.

Rui Lebre, Luís Bastião, Carlos Costa

Background and Objective: Nowadays usage paradigms of medical imaging resources are requesting vendor-neutral archives, accessible through standard interfaces, with multi-repository support. Regional repositories shared by distinct institutions, teleradiology as a service at Cloud, teaching and research archives, are illustrative examples of this new reality. However, traditional production environments have a server archive instance per functional domain where every registered client application has access to all studies. This paper proposes an innovator ownership concept and access control mechanisms that provide a multi-repository environment and integrates well with standard protocols. Methods: A secure accounting mechanism for medical imaging repositories were designed and instantiated as an extension of a well-known open-source archive. A new Web services layer was implemented to provide a vendor-neutral solution complaint with modern DICOM-Web protocols for storage, search and retrieve of medical imaging data. Results: The concept validation was done through the integration of proposed architecture in an open-source solution. A quantitative assessment was performed for evaluating the impact of the mechanism in the usual DICOM Web operations. Conclusions: This article proposes a secure accounting architecture able to easily convert a standard medical imaging archive server in a multi-repository solution. The proposal validation was done through a set of tests that demonstrated its robustness and usage feasibility in a production environment. The proposed system offers new services, fundamental in a new era of Cloud-based operations, with acceptable temporal costs.