Posts by stridde

The error message is clear. The connection attempt (association) is not accepted by the station with the AE title "TM_CT_CMW_V3.00", which I assume is your CT scanner. There is probably one of three reasons for that:

1. Missing configuration:
Did you also add the K-PACS station to the CT scanner's DICOM settings (with AE, IP and port)? Many stations will only communicate with stations that they "know". Otherwise any communication attempts are rejected.




2. Wrong configuration:
Verify that your configuration on both ends is correct. In some networks IP addresses are not static, making their use difficult. Also ports could be blocked, either by other applications or firewalls.




3. DICOM commands not supported:
Not every modality supports Query/Retrieve as SCP. In some cases you have to pay extra to have this function added to your system. Did you verify that your CT scanner supports to be queried from another station? Do you already have another station from which you can query successfully?

For verification of either of these ideas and for further details I would suggest to also consult the log information of the CT scanner. What does the log say about the association requests coming from K-PACS? Are they registered at all?

If it works at all in Cyrillic, then it will do so only on a native Cyrillic operating system (i.e. Russian, Bulgarian or the Cyrillic variant of Serbian), since K-PACS does not support Unicode language files. But no guarantees.

My suggestion would be to try iQ-VIEW instead. The current version already has a Russian and a Bulgarian user interface integrated so you can see how that works.

Thank you for your positive reply and the suggestion for other users.

Installing software under "C:\Program Files" will certainly work also under Windows 8.1, but the installer needs to take care of the folder permissions. I don't think that the K-PACS installer does that, since it was created with Windows XP and Vista in mind.

So, yes, using the C:\ directory could be a good choice.

Not being able to save configuration settings sounds like you do not have sufficient user permissions to do so. Run K-PACS as administrator, try setting specific folder permissions and/or disable the UAC. No guarantees, though.

The "presets" option is meant to be used for settings that you know you will need more than just once and allow you to quickly switch your current image leveling to a bone window or lung window or something.

For individual changes within an image, i.e. correcting an imperfect acquisition at the modality, you can use the windowing function to alter the brightness and contrast using the mouse up/down or left/right. For visualizing specific tissues you can use the ROI window. Just mark the area of interest and the contrast/brightness will be recalculated on the basis of the selected image pixels.

Why are you using such an old version of K-PACS? The current version is 1.6.0. Might be that the verbose mode of the server did not even exist in that version you are using.

We offer lots of DICOM studies in our Download Center. Just log in with the same login data you use for this forum. And then check out the section "Demo Images".

Use the verbose mode option in the server admin tool. Activate the option, best increase the number of displayed lines in the command prompt window and then repeat the sending of the data.

The log options are much, much nicer in iQ-VIEW, though.

The log does not show any errors. Maybe you should check the receiving station for errors instead. Maybe you don't have permission to write in the database folder. Or a firewall prevents the transfer. Or the database/imagebox is not correctly configured. Or the UIDs of the study are too long and the database path too deep in the Windows folder structure, so that the allowed number of characters is exceeded and the objects cannot be stored.

PLEASE NOTE: K-PACS is a NON-SUPPORTED software tool designed to work only in a Windows XP or Windows VISTA environment. Because the development of K-PACS has ceased, there may be issues with using K-PACS on newer operating systems. It has not been validated on any operating systems nor has it been certified as a medical device by the FDA or CE for any working or commercial environment. FOR LEGAL AND LIABILITY REASONS, IMAGE INFORMATION SYSTEMS DOES NOT CONDONE ITS USE IN A COMMERCIAL ENVIRONMENT OR FOR MEDICAL PURPOSES. No support will be given either by phone or email for this product.

WARNING:
BE ADVISED THAT HEALTHCARE LAWS AND REGULATIONS, AS WELL AS THE END USER LICENSE AGREEMENT, RESTRICT K-PACS FROM BEING USED FOR ANY DIAGNOSTIC OR PROFESSIONAL PURPOSE(S).

ALTERNATIVE:
As an alternative to K-PACS, we recommend that you consider using our FDA and CE certified diagnostic viewing station, iQ-VIEW, for a comprehensive and supported solution. A free 30 day trial can be found here.

For more information or clarification on the usage of K-PACS, please send your questions to info [at] image-systems.biz. Again, no support will be given on this software tool and no liability is assumed by IMAGE Information Systems.

Dear Dr. Bartalena

Thank you for your interest in our next iQ-VIEW software version, which will be version 3.0.0. As you could see in our newsletter, we will present a preview of the upcoming version during the RSNA. But for those of you who are not able to join us at the RSNA, I just prepared a little developers' preview, which is based on the preview we gave during our last reseller training course.

You can find a sneak preview to the most interesting features and enhancements here.

I hope that this will make you curious about the new version and that you will find something for you to look forward to.

By the way, the 2.8.0 feature information you are referring to, was actually not a preview. It was part of the iQ-VIEW 2.8.0 installation package and functioned more or less as a concise change log.

Quote from GilbertK

1. In dicom.ini of conquest I found a TCPIPTimeOut but not a DIMSE time-out. Is this the same?
The TCPIP timeout is set to 300s. The timeout of conquest has not yet reached when K-PACS already indicates an error.

I'm not sure if that's the parameter. TCP/IP usually would refer to the network communication (how computers communicate with each other via network). DIMSE is a DICOM term and refers to the transfer of DICOM objects. If you are sure that the TCP/IP time-out of 300 sec is not reached, then it may be that a DIMSE time-out occurs further. I would suggest that you switch over to the ConQuest boards in this forum and try to get an answer to this question over there.

Quote from GilbertK

2. in k-pacs.ini I found the following “SecondProposedTransferSyntax=1.2.840.10008.1.2.4.70“
How can I find out if that’s the format in which the images are saved in imagebox?

By default, K-PACS will uncompress all images that arrive in its imagebox. Unless you changed the default settings, this should be the case. You can open a study in the viewer and use the DICOM header dump view to check which transfer syntax the images have. That will be the one that the images are stored in.

Quote from GilbertK

If I change to Little Endian Explicit, would I write the entry that as follows?
SecondProposedTransferSyntax= Little Endian Explicit

No, You always have to use the UID of the transfer syntax, not its name. The correct parameter would be:
SecondProposedTransferSyntax=1.2.840.10008.1.2.1

Quote from GilbertK

The last line of k-pacs.ini says "ExportAlwaysLittleEndianExplicit=0". Would it be an option to set this to 1?

No, this option only refers to the export of DICOM images to CD/DVD in case you burn a patient medium with K-PACS.

Are you saying that you successfully installed and ran K-PACS on a Windows 8/8.1 computer? Any specific settings you used (like "run as administrator", disabling UAC, etc.)? This may help others getting a K-PACS installation running. Thanks.

It's true that K-PACS is not specifically designed to run in Windows virtualizations on MAC computers. I also have no reports about K-PACS users doing that. But I know that there are quite a few people out there (including some colleagues) who run iQ-VIEW successfully in such an environment. I can't guarantee that it will work for K-PACS as well, but there is a chance that it will.

With "large clips" I suppose you refer to multi-frame DICOM objects (such as ultrasound or enhanced CT or MR) where one object contains a number of frames, like a video file.

During the transfer of such big DICOM objects it can happen that the association (connection) times out, especially when the object needs to be prepared first before sending. This is often the case when DICOM objects are sent in a compressed form and the compression first has to be done. It takes a while and the receiving station times out because it "thinks" that nothing is happening.

There are two options to prevent this from happening:

1. You can force the receiving station to keep the association open longer, so the time-out will come later. This can create a big enough time frame to send over the big DICOM object. In this case, you would have to increase the DIMSE time-out at the ConQuest.
2. You can disable the image compression feature and send the DICOM object in its original form. This you can check in the K-PACS.ini. Look for the parameter "SecondProposedTransferSyntax=" and set it to Little Endian Explicit as transfer syntax. Unless you store the images in a different format in the K-PACS imagebox. In that case you should use that particular transfer syntax UID.

Sometimes, with really large objects, you may have to do both to succeed.

Any specific issues that you would like to or could share with the community? We get questions like this once in a while and it would be nice if people could look it up in the forum. Thanks.

You run a query, select the studies you wish to retrieve by marking the checkbox and click the "View" button. The data will be retrieved and stored in the local K-PACS imagebox, provided that you have correctly configured the connection between Osirix and K-PACS (correct AE titles, IP addresses and ports). The viewer opens and displays the studies.

If you change the settings in the "Local settings" to "only retrieve (don't show)", the "View" button is renamed into "Load in". Clicking the button will retrieve the data, store it locally but not open the viewer automatically to display the loaded studies.

K-PACS was developed at a time when operating systems such as Windows 7 and 8 did not yet exist. It was basically designed to work on XP and Vista. You may try it out, but we cannot confirm that the application will run faultlessly on the newer operating systems.

For a more comprehensive, supported solution, please consider our FDA and CE approved diagnostic viewing station, iQ-VIEW, as an alternative. While the current version has not been officially validated on Windows 8, it seems to run well on this OS. The next software version will officially support Windows 8 and can then also be used for diagnostic purposes on this OS.

This is done in K-PACS. Go to "Local settings" and then choose the "Server Admin Tool" option. There you can find the path settings for the IB and DB. The paths must exist, preferably both IB and DB in the same location. And they must end with a backslash "\", NOT with a slash "/".

Verify also that enough space is available on the K-PACS computer so that images can be stored. The IB/DB should also be in a path not too deep within the Windows folder structure (e.g. D:\Database) to ensure that the long paths and file names are accepted.

Alternatively, you can try to send some data from ConQuest to that station and check if the data shows up. Check the logs in ConQuest if it doesn't work either. It may give you some clues.

Sounds like a configuration error.

Check that the second K-PACS station is correctly configured in ConQuest ... especially the IP address and the port. Make sure that the K-PACS station is really running on that IP address and on that port. Also make sure that the selected port (104) is free to be used. Verify that the K-PACS server is runnning and that the imagebox/database are correctly set up (IB/DB paths with "\" at the end).

Also a firewall or anti-virus program could be responsible for a failure in transmitting the images.