Abstract
Collaborations in biomedical research and clinical studies require that data, software, and computational resources be shared between geographically distant institutions. In radiology, there is a related issue of sharing remote DICOM data over the Internet. This paper focuses on the problem of federating multiple image data resources such that clients can interact with them as if they are stored in a centralized PACS. We present a toolkit, called VirtualPACS, to support this functionality. Using the toolkit, users can perform standard DICOM operations (query, retrieve, and submit) across distributed image databases. The key features of the toolkit are: (1) VirtualPACS makes it easy to use existing DICOM client applications for data access; (2) it can easily be incorporated into an imaging workflow as a DICOM source; (3) using VirtualPACS, heterogeneous collections of DICOM sources are exposed to clients through a uniform interface and common data model; and (4) DICOM image databases without DICOM messaging can be accessed.
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Notes
NCI Clinical Trials Cooperative Group: A group of researchers, cancer centers, and community doctors who are involved in studies of new cancer treatment, prevention, early detection, quality of life, and rehabilitation, e.g., Radiation Therapy Oncology Group (RTOG) (as defined in National Cancer Institutes Dictionary of Cancer Terms, http://www.cancer.gov/dictionary).
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Acknowledgments
We wish to acknowledge Dr. Eliot Siegel for his guidance, inspiration and encouragement, Dr. David Clunie, Dr. David Channin, and Dr. Lawrence Tarbox for their helpful feedback and technical suggestions, Paul Mulhern and David Kupferschmid for facilitating this effort, and to all the participants in the caBIG In Vivo Imaging workspace. This work was supported in part by funding from caBIG/NCI/Booz Allen Hamilton (79077CBS10 for caGrid and In Vivo Imaging Middleware), the National Institutes of Health (Grants NIBIB BISTI P20-EB000591, and NCI U54 CA113001), the National Science Foundation (Grants CNS-0615155 and CNS-0509326), and the Biomedical Research and Technology Transfer Consortium grant (BRTT 02-0003).
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Sharma, A., Pan, T., Cambazoglu, B.B. et al. VirtualPACS—A Federating Gateway to Access Remote Image Data Resources over the Grid. J Digit Imaging 22, 1–10 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10278-007-9074-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10278-007-9074-z