This started out as a request from a user, and we thought it would be an interesting project for us. We’re currently in the early stages of evaluating the feasibility of developing a DICOM tags search application. The objective is to allow users to use SQL queries to search for DICOM images using values from the DICOM tags embedded in the images.
Step 1 – reading the tags from your DICOM images
We plan to allow you to read the DICOM images from a database, or from DICOM files already on your computer.
Step 2 – storing the data elements/tag values
This is the hardest part. A DICOM image can contain both standard and private data elements/tags. For a start, we will only be indexing most of the standard data elements/tags (over 2800).
Step 3 – querying the tag values
Once stored in a database, users can use SQL syntax to query the tag values. We will also look into adding a query builder to help non-technical users.
Step 4 – displaying the images
Once we have the results of the query, we can display the images using the user’s preferred DICOM viewer.
Issues/bottlenecks
We do not have any experience working with PACS nor have access to any such system. We are approaching this purely from a database developer perspective – read the images, store the tag values in a database, allow users to query the database, and display the results.
If you are interested in such an application and can spare some time to help us test the application as we go along, or there are features you would like to see in such an application, please drop us an email at support@yohz.com. Thank you.
See also: