NA-MIC Project Weeks

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Visual DICOM browser

Key Investigators

Davide Punzo (Freelancer, France)
Andras Lasso (Perk Labs, Canada)
Steve Pieper (Isomics, Inc., USA)
Jean-Christophe Fillion-Robin (Kitware, USA)
anyone is welcome! ()

Presenter location: In-person

Project Description

The visual DICOM browser provides a new user interface for quick viewing and retrieval of patient images stored on remote DICOM servers. The new tool is optimized for clinical workflows where the focus is on all the images of a single patient - as opposed to the existing DICOM browsing experience, which was more suitable for bringing together images from many patients.

Both server and local content are located at the same place and are visualized by thumbnails. All data is retrieved in the background using classic DIMSE networking (most commonly used protocols in hospitals), in multiple concurrently running threads. The currently supported operations are:

Browsing and filtering with thumbnails of content of local DICOM database and multiple remote DICOM servers.
Query/Retrieve data from servers (DIMSE C-FIND, C-GET, C-MOVE SCU). All the operations are done in background and in parallel. Downloaded data is automatically cached in the local DICOM database. A unique feature is the possibility to retrieve images using C-GET protocol (suitable for cases when many Slicer instances are running in docker containers) with a clinical PACS that only supports C-MOVE protocol (most clinical PACS), via a proxy server (such as the free Orthanc).
Import data from local files.
Receive data sent from remote PACS (DIMSE C-STORE SCP).
Send data to remote PACS (DIMSE C-STORE SCU).
Quick browsing of all DICOM metadata and pixel data.
Remove data from local database (not from server).

The widget is currently an experimental feature in Slicer (DICOM module). Current Roadmap is at link.

Possible long term ENH to discuss/work during the project week:

add data streaming from visual brower series widgets to Slicer volume nodes.
handle jobs queue in the scheduler by file (so we can restart the jobs/workers at application restart).
implementing send in C++ at ctk level (i.e. adding ctkDICOMSendJob, ctkDICOMSendWorker and ctkDICOMSend with underlining DIMSE DcmStorageSCU). This would allow to use the background/parallel operations infrastructure for SEND as well.
add DICOMweb.

Objective

Finalize the ctk visual DICOM browser:

Get feedback from users/developers.
Prioritize short term ENH-BUG fixes to do. See Roadmap for more info.
Discuss the long term ENH.

Approach and Plan

Have a meeting/demo with people interested for colletting feedback.
Prioritize/coordinated any future development based on the feedback.

Progress and Next Steps

A Job list UI has been implemented/tested.
We had a demo on Tuesday and we discussed the roadmap in details.
I have started implementating the feedback. See the roadmap for detailed informations.

Illustrations

screenshots:

Visual DICOM Browser	Jobs and Settings

video:

UML Diagram:

Background and References