Conquest as Dicom Gateway & co.

    Hi to all. This is my first post in this forum and I hope to have respected the rules.
    First of all thanks to who is working to mantain the Conqest project. This is a greath work and a fantastic software. Light, Fast, Efficient, Configurable, written by people who use It and this is simply the best way to do It !


    Now about this post. I'm a "newbye" Conquest user and I'm not an expert of Dicom issues but I'm trying to set-up a test system. I was very impressed about the possibility to use Conquest with the http interface and I appreciated the possibility to submit a ZIP file containing the Dicom study in order to import It inside the system.
    There is a way to do It in reverse way ? For example after located a study the possibility to make a ZIP archive containing the study and then download It by http browser instead to make a "push" to a dicom device ?


    This could be very useful in that situations where there is a firewall-proxy or is not possible to use the Dicom protocol transfer.



    Another question hoping to not boring you too much.
    I've set-up a Windows based PC with severals Gbytes of Disk space dedicated to the image archive as MAG0.
    After this I have connected a Gigabit NAS (Western Digital ShareSpace) as MAG1 in order to nightly move automatically the older images to this device and free some space in MAG0.
    It works but I'm concerned about the transfer NAS efficiency that is very poor for a lot of short files as Dicom Images.
    After some tests I found that this issue isn't caused by Conqest but it's a sort of overhead in Windows Network protocol. The transfer rate is about 1 image per second during transfer to the NAS and 2-5 images per second during the retrieve.
    If I try to save a big file (for example 1000 images zipped into a single archive) the transfer rate is "nominal" with a transfer rate of about 400-600 Mbit/sec (the network connection is Gigabit class).


    The question ARE:
    - To achieve a reasonable transfer efficiency I need to change the NAS with a DAS (for example an USB HDD or fiber channel storage server unit) Do you have more experiences about this issue ?
    - What about the possibility to "pack" on the fly in a ZIP file the older studyies who needs to be transferred to the NAS in a Zip file before to transfer them and in case of a retrieve do the reverse operation by unpacking on the fly the ZIP archive to the MAG0 (or other) unit before to initiate the Dicom Move ?


    I'm just writing some non-sense sentences or there's something useful in this post ?


    Thanks in advance for reading this and sorry for my bad english.



    Davide.

    Hi Davida,


    glad you like the software ;->>>


    There is a built-in command in 1.4.16rc2 to zip a series/study/patient into one file, but I have not yet exposed this to the web interface. I will add it to the wish list. It is possible to use a batch (dgate --export:) command to create the zip file, and then place it in the incoming folder of another folder. The syntax is:


    dgate --export:patient,studyuid,seriesuid,sopuid,zipfile,script
    e.g. dgate --export:2000011,,,,2000011.zip


    where:
    patient: ID of patient (required)
    studyuid: optional
    seriesuid: optional
    sopuid: optional
    zipfile: name of output zip or 7z file
    script: optional import converter-like script run on each slice.


    Similarly, the dgate --submit command can transfer the zipped file over sftp outside the firewall. The script can then be used to anonymize the data.


    As far the NAS issue is concerned, I have no plans to support zipped storage of DICOM images. This would greatly improve performance, but it is a major change. I have no experience with a DAS, but I assume it should achieve local disk speeds.


    Marcel

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