DICOM Data Transfer of Radiology Images based on Publish-Subscribe Software Architecture

Abstract

Introduction: Various methods have been introduced for the offline exchange of radiological images between medical centers using technologies such as CD or E-mail. Costly infrastructures such as PACS have also been introduced to exchange images in a medical center. But these methods or dedicated networks between various centers are practically impossible.Methods: In this observational study, publish-subscribe software architecture is presented to facilitate communication between medical centers, considering the challenge of scalability. This approach transfers the images in DICOM format to the publish/subscribe server. Other medical centers receive the images by subscribing to this service and specifying their interesting images.Results: The simulation results of this architecture on a data set of DICOM images and the number of publishers and subscribers showed that the system’s response time does not increase much and it maintains an appropriate data transfer speed while the number of users increases. For this reason, it has good scalability.Conclusion: Implementing the publish-subscribe architecture showed that eliminating the dependency between imaging and medical centers makes implementing and interacting with users easier. From this point of view, this architecture has excellent potential to create an infrastructure for sharing images between medical centers.

Keywords

• software
• radiology
• computers
• data exchange