How to connect efilm to DCM4CHEE web3 interface

[Babar Siraj]

Hi everyone

In my setup, DCM4CHEE archive 2.17.3 is working fine (Windows 7 with MySQL). I have installed Weasis as viewer. However, Radiologists are not satisfied with Weasis rather they have preference for efilm viewer. How can I launch efilm from DCM4CHEE web3 interface to retrieve and view required DICOM images. Is it possible? Any idea!!

Moreover I have used efilm workstation 3.4 to connect to DCM4CHEE. It connects well and lists all the studies, however it does not retrieve and view the studies. what could be wrong?

Kindly, if someone can help me out

Thanks in advance

[fleetwoodfc]

Have you added the AE,IP and port of efilm to the DCM4CHEE Application Entities?

[Babar Siraj]

Thanks for the tip. After I added efilm as new AET in DCM4CHEE, I am able to view studies. 

But what about connecting efilm to the DCM4CHEE web3 interface. Is it possible to launch efilm from within DCM4CHEE web3 interface to view studies 

Any idea!

[fleetwoodfc]

efilm is not web based so it would be difficult to launch from the web3 interface. You can manually 'push' studies to efilm from the dcm4chee web3 interface or you can auto send using the dcm4chee forward (or forward2) service. 

[Babar Siraj]

Thanks for your response. I have got two more queries

1) You can manually 'push' studies to efilm from the dcm4chee web3 interface

I understand that you are pointing to use "Export" . Is it correct?

2) To view studies in efilm, adding of its AET, IP and port to DCM4CHEE AET is required. However adding IP address is not practicable when using efilm on a machine with dynamic ip address.   I have to change IP address of efilm AE in DCM4CHEE again and again otherwise it doesn't work. any workaround to this problem? 

[fleetwoodfc]

Yes you use "Export" to manually push studies.

You can use a server name and DNS rather than the actual IP.  

You can also pull studies (Q/R) from dcm4chee using C-GET or WADO if efilm supports it. With C-GET or WADO, dcm4chee does not need to know the client AET,IP and port.

[Jon Ander Zuccaro]

I have done this before, let me check if I can give you some code but if I remember correctly I was able to do it with eFilm.

Here is what you need and it applies to any stand alone viewer.

First and foremost you need to check if you can launch the eFilm executable with some parameters, I think it is a little more complicated than that with eFilm but you will get the point. Something like this   efilm.exe -studyUID 1.2.3445.....  the idea being that this will launch eFilm and open that study directly. Almost all viewers have such an option, even the standalone ones, precisely for this scenario.

Second, this wont work unless the images are physically at the clients computer, so this doesn't makes much sense unless every study is routed to the eFilm station since all you are doing is launching eFilm providing a Study Instance UID, since the station's space is probably limited this will only work for a limited set of studies, perhaps the one not older than one month or something.

Third you need to launch an executable from a web page, which goes against everything that a web page represents, but it is possible: with an applet (you will have to sign it and give it special permissions, maybe a jnlp or an Activex (IE only)).

The idea being, from the web page, you construct a javascript call to the applet passing the studyInstaceUID, the applet then calls the executable on the client's machine launching eFilm with the study instance uid provided.

This arrangement made sense because it was a web based RIS that presented radiologists with a list of studies that were to be read, so they clicked the study, eFilm was launched locally with the corresponding study and they dictated inside the RIS. I made this for other viewers like piView, RADWORKS, and others.

This is a very ugly and fragile solution, it worked for a while but it was prone to all kinds of things going wrong.

So -> onclick call to scriptable applet -> signed applet calls local executable -> executable launches with the given parameter but it is assumed that the images are already there locally.

Hope it helps.

[Jon Ander Zuccaro]

Here you go, I knew that with eFilm it was a little more complicated, integrating it and opening it required C++ coding... sadly I lost that code but here is the integration manual: https://estore.merge.com/RESOURCES/pdf/eFilmHISRISSDKv09.pdf