K-PACS with Conquest ?

    I saw your post elsewhere on this forum regarding Conquest, and I can vouch for the extreme stability of this free PACS server, when used with MS SQL 7 or 2000. We have over 10000 patient studies stored on a 700GB RAID5 archive, and everything works great, and it is by far the best free fully-fledged PACS server/archive I have tried over the past 7 years! In comparison, I had tried PacsOne in different releases and found it not only clumsy to use but quite unstable and buggy (their forum users actually agree on that, even those paying $$$ for the supposedly professional version!).


    I wish I could talk as hghly about the efilm workstations we are using. Efilm bugs are starting to drive us crazy (latest 2.0 upgrade gave me headaches and the first BSOD in years!), and I am not talking about compatibitliy issues with Conquest, but even about workstation usability and crashes issues, and transmissions between two efilm workstations.


    Therefore, I am very pleased to see that you are undertaking the challenging task to come up with your own version of a DICOM viewer. If it could work wtih Conquest PACS, that would make an awesome combination. I am planning to try K-PACS very soon, and would even be willing to help with the development, especially if it was done in Delphi. I have actually several DICOM code bites I have developped myself, that I would gladly share on this project.


    Based on our years of hunt for the right software, here are some features we think would be useful for a workstation (not in order):


    - Q/R to a DICOM server like Conquest (pull)
    - multi-monitor support
    - Good intuitive user interface, maximizing the functions through mouse buttons AND wheel support! Customization should allow at least for W/L, Zoom/pan using left, right, middle, wheel or a combination of left+right, without having to let your eyes leave the image to look for menus. This is critical for serious use. Have radiologist review 100 cases in a day and you'll get plenty of useful insight on a good design (like Novapacs GUI, unfortunately not free)
    - DICOM SCP storage for most modalities (push)
    - True Multi-thread / multi-process applications based on a RELIABLE DICOM network stack like UCDavis/Conquest or Mallinkrodt (I wish efilm was relying on them !!!). It might not be worth it for you to spend time on this portion
    - Good DICOM printing support (efilm DICOM color printing supoprt has glitches with some planar configs like from Logiq 500). I have some code snippets I developped to work with a Fuji DICOM printer, which obviously should work with most DICOM printers
    - Support for side-by-side comparison of studies
    - As lised in another post on this forum, the ability to mark studies as read would be a great PLUS, but if you want it to work in a multi viewstations environment, you would need to make it work with the central server database. Could use Conquest, but extend the SQL db with some Read fields.
    - Ability to automatically prefetch other studies from the same patient from the server
    - Measurements/annotations
    - Support for mutiframe images (US and XA)
    - Burn on CD as both DICOM and JPEG with embedded DICOM viewer would be nice. It the viewer on CD supports XA cines, that would make it a top pick over efilm (right now CardIcon is the best separate option)


    Well, maybe you implemented already several of these fatures, and I missed a lot too (calibration, HPs, etc.), so I end this post now as I am about to install K-PACS.


    Congratulations and good luck on your project!


    Max

    Hello maxpat,


    thank's for joining the forum and your really helpful post.


    At first, Conquest is my first choice as well. We ourself have more than 10000 patients in 3 seperate conquest databases, one for CT's, one for MRs and one for US. That's why I intensively tested conquest with K-PACS and designed my own DB layout after their sql table. I hope you can reproduce my good testing results with your conquest intallation.
    Dicom connectivity of K-PACS is based on the DCMTK from OFFIS which I found to be very stable and reliable. The viewer is based on Chris Rordens ezDicom plugin, which is one of the fastest and resource sparing dicom plugins I know.
    K-PACS is still under heavy developement and has many bugs, but we use it in routine every day for image presentation and import of foreign CDs into our conquest db and I am very optimistic that sometime it will even surpass the "one-and-only" E-film in stability and functionality.


    Thanks for your ideas concerning useful features. They completely match with my vision of a good workstation and this is definitely the way, I intend K-PACS to go to.


    I would be thankful for any help with the developement. K-PACS is completely written in delphi but I plan to give C++ a try, although I am not a C-programmer, but all DCMTK libraries are written in C++.


    Currently I'am in need of help for implementing dicom print into K-PACS. There are some DCMTK tools for doing this, but we don't have a dicom compliant printer to test on . If you have experience in this subject, I would be glad to hear from you.



    Andreas

    Hello,


    first of all, I want to say, looking the sceenshots, that you ve done a bloody good job with your prog.
    I also use conquestpacs, and ist running stable under mysql und mssql and not that evil to install like pacsone.
    I did not had that bad experience with efilm, what I am using about 4 years, but its gettin a little bit expensiv, and so I am lookin for a good prog for my remote doctors, in general orthopaedic surgeons who want to at the picts.
    I want to wait for the update of your prog.
    What would be great would be the possibilty to send picts via net, we sometimes have to send picts to neurosurgeons with the question of intervention in case of intracerebral bleeding.
    The integration of a web-server could be useful, cause pacs one is horrible to install and not that stable.
    best wishes to you and success to your prog.

    Hello Bushanger,


    At first, welcome to the forum.


    As I understood, you are using conquest right now and some efilm workstations. How do your neurosurgeons or remote doctors get to see the images right now? Do they have their own efilm clients and query your conquest or do you send images via your efilm workstation?
    In general: with k-pacs you can communicate with conquest similar to the way you do it with efilm. So, your doctors could query your conquest server by themselfes, or you can push images from your k-pacs client to theirs, if you don't want to give them access to your server.
    This way of communication requires an intranet strucutre or a VPN. If your remote doctors are located outside of your network you could use the email function of k-pacs. We are testing k-pacs for teleradiology purposes right now: Our radiographer on duty sends the requested studies via email to the radiologist at home. He imports the attached images into his K-PACS database and views them. For security reason I included an encryption routine. The routine ist stricktly proprietory and source code of the routines will not be published.



    The best thing to do for you is: try it out.


    Andreas

    Hello Andreas,


    thanks for your fast reply.
    At the moment, I ll send the picts via email as attacht ( as pdf-files ) to the neurosurgeons
    For reviewing the picts at homes as a remote service your prog would be great, so the radiologist could install the same prog. and would be able to review the studie, I ll try this at once.
    Part of the doctors have efilm 1.5.3, but sending the studies direktly via internet is tricky, I am working on that, perhaps it will go better with k-pacs.
    anyway, I ll post my experience, perhaps you are interest in information how it works.


    Hans

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