Retrieving with movescu where study contains 2 formats

[Clay Dooley]

I am working on a project that includes a query/retrieve capability implemented by "wrapping" the movescu application in a dll. My problem is that our clients (hospitals which perform heart ultrasounds) like to use Acuson Sequoia ultrasound machines, which store single-frame images compressed in RLE format, and multi-frame images in JPEG format. These ultrasound machines send their data to a hospital network which has a PACS storage system, which our software is supposed to query and retrieve. However, it seems that the RLE incoming transfer syntax (option "+xr") and the JPEG incoming transfer syntax (option "+xy") are incompatible with each other, even though studies generated on these ultrasound machines use both formats within the same study. A movescu request using +xy does not return the still frames (RLE), and a movescu request using +xr returns all images but with the motion clips (JPEG) scrambled.

My question is, is there a way to get movescu to return all images in a study, in the format in which they were originally stored, so that a study containing a mixture of RLE and JPEG will contain both formats?

[Marco Eichelberg]

It is not possible with movescu alone to retrieve images in both RLE and JPEG encoding within a single association. It would be possible to setup the storescp tool as a receiver that accepts both RLE and JPEG images and use movescu only for handling the C-MOVE request and response messages. You would need to use the new "association negotiation profile from configuration file" option introduced in DCMTK 3.5.3 for storescp for this purpose (a sample configuration file is included and would probably do the job for you as it is). This functionality could certainly also be added to movescu, thus removing the need for a separate tool, but it currently is not.

[Clay Dooley]

Thank you for the tip. I have found that with the new toolkit, which includes a configuration file for storescp that enables receiving both RLE and JPEG images from the same study, it is possible to perform a Query/Retrieve that receives both kinds of images. One specifies storescp's AETitle in the call to movescu, and the images will then be sent to storescp. It is not necessary or desirable to wrap storescp in a dll like I did with movescu; instead, the technique I used is to use Win32's CreateProcess to launch it as a separate process. Because CreateProcess launches storescp in its own console window, it is necessary to use AllocateConsole to create my own console window, use FindWindow and ShowWindow to hide it, and use CREATE_NEW_PROCESS_GROUP in the CreateProcess call. Storescp will use this hidden console window, eliminating having a confusing separate console window pop up over my application. It is also possible to use a form of Ctrl-Break to terminate storescp in this mode. One uses GetStdHandle and then SetConsoleMode with the ENABLE_PROCESSED_INPUT flag set to enable Ctrl-Break on the hidden console window. After this a call to GenerateConsoleCtrlEvent with the CTRL_BREAK_EVENT flag will terminate storescp. A call to FreeConsole closes the hidden console window.

Thanks a lot!