Dicoogle Open Source: The Establishment of a New Paradigm in Medical Imaging.

The rapid and continuous growth of data volume and its heterogeneity has become one of the most noticeable trends in healthcare, namely in medical imaging. This evolution led to the deployment of specialized information systems supported by the DICOM standard that enables the interoperability of distinct components, including imaging modalities, repositories, and visualization workstations. However, the complexity of these ecosystems leads to challenging learning curves and makes it time-consuming to mock and apply new ideas. Dicoogle is an extensible medical imaging archive server that emerges as a tool to overcome those challenges. Its extensible architecture allows the fast development of new advanced features or extends existent ones. It is currently a fundamental enabling technology in collaborative and telehealthcare environments, including research projects, screening programs, and teleradiology services. The framework is supported by a Learning Pack that includes a description of the web programmatic interface, a software development kit, documentation, and implementation samples. This article gives an in-depth view of the Dicoogle ecosystem, state-of-the-art contributions, and community impact. It starts by presenting an overview of its architectural concept, highlights some of the most representative research backed up by Dicoogle, some remarks obtained from its use in teaching, and worldwide usage statistics of the software. Finally, the positioning of Dicoogle in the medical imaging software field is discussed through comparison with other well-known solutions.

Shared Medical Imaging Repositories.

This article describes the implementation of a solution for the integration of ownership concept and access control over medical imaging resources, making possible the centralization of multiple instances of repositories. The proposed architecture allows the association of permissions to repository resources and delegation of rights to third entities. It includes a programmatic interface for management of proposed services, made available through web services, with the ability to create, read, update and remove all components resulting from the architecture. The resulting work is a role-based access control mechanism that was integrated with Dicoogle Open-Source Project. The solution has several application scenarios like, for instance, collaborative platforms for research and tele-radiology services deployed at Cloud.

Dicoogle - an open source peer-to-peer PACS.

Picture Archiving and Communication Systems (PACS) have been widely deployed in healthcare institutions, and they now constitute a normal commodity for practitioners. However, its installation, maintenance, and utilization are still a burden due to their heavy structures, typically supported by centralized computational solutions. In this paper, we present Dicoogle, a PACS archive supported by a document-based indexing system and by peer-to-peer (P2P) protocols. Replacing the traditional database storage (RDBMS) by a documental organization permits gathering and indexing data from file-based repositories, which allows searching the archive through free text queries. As a direct result of this strategy, more information can be extracted from medical imaging repositories, which clearly increases flexibility when compared with current query and retrieval DICOM services. The inclusion of P2P features allows PACS internetworking without the need for a central management framework. Moreover, Dicoogle is easy to install, manage, and use, and it maintains full interoperability with standard DICOM services.