Store DICOMS in zip files

[Jan Pedersen]

Hi,

We are building a setup where we have data available as both dicoms and niftis, but will primarily be using the niftis, and the dicoms will seldomly be used. We are therefore considering to zip dicoms such that all dicoms from a given scan resides in a single zip-file.

We have considered a couple of different options on how to achieve this but so far we have not found one that ticks all the boxes:

1. Create a custom Image import processor:

This is somewhat straight forward and seems to fall within the intended use, however to my understanding the Image import processors are only employed on SCP-received data. Since we have most of our data available as bulk storage we would prefer to use the DICOM-zip import handler for data importing. Can anyone confirm that the Image importers are only for data received over SCU/SCP?

2. Modify the code that handles moving data from prearchive to archive

This could in principle be a straight forward solution, however I am not a big fan of changing default XNAT code as it would make updating a (even bigger) pain. I am also not sure then how to handle the catalog-xml and whether I can do that without changing in too many different source code files.

3. Handle while generating niftis and use pyxnat

This approach is mentioned in this post https://groups.google.com/g/xnat_discussion/c/-LhjUWSWfK8/m/bQVWIeOdAgAJ, and would indeed be a possibility too. We are though handling our dicom-to-nifti conversion through the Container service with the processing happening on a HPC, and I feel this would lead to quite an overhead in transferring the image data back and forth.

Any suggestions, comments or ideas are highly welcome!

Kind regards,
Jan Ole