Quantitative Evaluation of PACS Query/Retrieve Capabilities.

The PACS (Picture Archiving and Communication System) market is heterogenous with dozens of PACS providers having deployed installations in healthcare facilities. The DICOM® query and retrieve interfaces provided by PACS have multiple variations, related to the implemented SOP (Service Object Pair) Classes, transfer syntaxes, extended negotiations, matching attributes, and matching types. These variations can make integration of a new DICOM® consumer with a PACS complex and time consuming. Even if most of PACS products provide a DICOM® conformance statement with a description of its query/retrieve capabilities, there is no collective analysis describing the various PACS query and retrieve capabilities and variations. Also, application developers and healthcare facilities lack a method to evaluate the PACS capabilities and classify its functionalities. GE designed a method to evaluate the PACS capabilities in terms of query retrieve functionalities. Our aim is to analyze several PACS in test and production environments, using our method to provide the DICOM® object consumers a macroscopic knowledge of query/retrieve capabilities of PACS functionalities and its different variations. Our evaluation can also be used by PACS and VNA (Vendor Neutral Archive) developers to evaluate their query/retrieve capabilities, for quality improvement purpose.