Integrating the Pacsbin uploader with your institution's PACS

While drag-and-drop upload of DICOM files works well for users who have access to the DICOM files of their studies, not everyone has this access. In particular, many hospitals lock down access to the raw DICOM files in the PACS system due to security concerns.

Thanks to the addition of new web-based image transfer protocols to the DICOM standard (DICOMweb), we have the ability to directly integrate the Pacsbin web uploader with institutional PACS systems.

DICOMweb

DICOMweb defines methods to query (QIDO-RS), retrieve (WADO-RS), and store (STOW-RS) DICOM files via HTTP(S) requests. This allows a web application, in this case the Pacsbin uploader, to directly send queries to a PACS image archive, retrieve images directly in the browser, and process them on-premise on the user's workstation. This means that all processing and anonymization of images can be done on-premise, on the institution's own network, without having to send images to an unknown cloud server for processing.

This also means that no separate on-premise server needs to be provisioned, configured, and maintained. The uploader application is served directly to the user's web browser, and the browser then issues requests directly to the PACS archive via DICOMweb HTTP requests.

Getting started

As this integration requires valid QIDO and WADO HTTP endpoints, these integrations are set up with the assistance of your hospital or institution's Radiology IT administrators. If you are interested in setting up an integration, please contact your IT administrators to start the process, and reach out to us at [email protected]

Using DIMSE instead

If your PACS or VNA vendor does not support (or has limited support) for DICOMweb, we have created a simple DIMSE to DICOMweb proxy server to enable integrating the uploader with legacy systems. See here