Product: DICOM Store Gateway (DSG)

The DSG functions as a gateway interface engine, allowing the user to route, replicate, monitor, and optionally alter DICOM store jobs. Because unrestricted end to end communications are difficult to manage, many facilities use interface engines as central mapping programs; the DSG acts in that role for DICOM communications. By using powerful mapping rules, one can easily route DICOM store jobs from point A to point B.

Additionally, by using its ability to apply custom filters, the DSG may be used to facilitate the interconnection of otherwise incompatible devices. Modalities need only be configured to talk to the gateway and mapping rules may be changed to re-direct the modality data to a different server. In each case the configuration and mapping is done once on the sources and destinations and reconfiguration can be handled centrally in the gateway.

The DSG may be used for load balancing or device multiplexing on a bank of servers. For example, an archive (server, SCP) might be shared among one or more modalities (client, SCU) without the need for configuring the archives to know about every modality in the pool.

Features:

• Mapping rules may be selected based on day of week and/or time of day to facilitate institutional scheduling requirements.
• User defined filters may be added to any association, providing the ability to modify or map certain fields before forwarding, thus allowing the user to correct various connectivity problems.
• Masquerading or making multiple client devices appear as a single device to a server device.
• Ability to alter the encoding (transfer syntax) of sop instances as they pass from one system to another, e.g., a modality stores images to the DSG as implicit-little-endian syntax, and the DSG forwards those images to a remote archive server using one of the various JPEG or JPEG 2000 compression transfer syntaxes.
• Logging or monitoring of all DICOM transactions in a user-friendly, human-readable format.
• Log verbosity that is dynamically configurable via the web interface.
• Routing DICOM store jobs from one SCU to more than one SCP facilitates testing of new devices.

Benefits:

• Control — Dynamic control of the mappings and related configuration facilitates ease of use.
• Selectivity — Users are able to control and monitor the associations or transactions of interest.
• Flexibility — Optional and configurable logging, diagnostic, and filtering operations may be performed as the messages are forwarded between devices.
• Portability — The DSG runs on a variety of platforms including Windows, Linux, and Solaris.

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