1.0 Indexing

Indexing is the process of reading all the DICOM tag values stored in your DICOM images and storing them in a database. You can then search for your images using these values.

1.1

What are libraries and why do you

need them

Libraries are used to store the details of related DICOM images together. When you search for images, you are searching on a single library. Note that the images aren’t stored in a library, only the tag values and optionally image thumbnails. Should you create one or multiple libraries? It depends on your needs. If you want to be able to search on your entire collection of images easily, then you would index all your images in a single library. If your images are logically grouped and you only want to search images related to those groups, then creating a library for each group makes sense. For e.g. you may create a library for ultrasound images, and another for MR images. Or if you need to be able to search for images regardless of their modality, you would create a single library for both ultrasound and MR images.

1.2

Creating a library

Let’s create a library for our sample images. To create a library, click on the Manage libraries button. On the Manage Libraries screen, click on the Add button. Enter a name and description for the library. Click on the Add / update images from folders button to start the indexing process. On the next page, enter the path containing our sample images. In our example, we enter e:\sample images\*. If your DICOM image files are stored in different folders, enter the path to each folder on a separate line, followed by the wildcard (*) symbol. If those folders contain other types of files, you may need to use the DICOM file extension instead e.g. e:\sample images\*.dcm to process only DICOM files. Note that we have chosen the Search sub-folders option, so DICOM Search will search recursively from the folder(s) we entered. You can choose to create thumbnails of the indexed images, and also specify the size of the thumbnail image. The thumbnails are used when viewing the search results. The additional key value is used when you want to further differentiate the images in your library. For e.g. let’s say that you want to create a single library containing images from various hospitals. When you index the images, there may be a DICOM tag value that identifies the image source, but there’s no guarantee that it’s unique. Instead, when you index images from Hospital A, you could enter an additional key value of Hospital A, when you index images from Hospital B, you enter a key value of Hospital B. When you later search for images, the key value can identify the image source, or you can use the key value to limit your search to specific hospitals. All the tag details and thumbnail images are stored in a database, which can grow quite large if you are indexing a lot of images. Thus, you may want to change the location of the database file. In the next step, DICOM Search will search the folders for files matching the search pattern we entered, and create an index of all the DICOM tags found in the image files. Click on the OK button to close this window. That’s it, we have created our first library. Now let’s start searching our images.

Section summary

• Use libraries to organize your images into logical grouping. • You can further categorize your images in the libraries using the Additional key value field. • Allocate enough space for the index file.

Related help file topics

• Libraries