DICOM Server Access

Dcmfetch is a python package for retrieving images from a DICOM server. The package does not provide a DICOM transport itself but wraps either the command line utilies from dcm4che3 or the native python library pynetdicom. In addition, bundled standalone versions of the required dcm4che3 tools are included so the only mandatory external (non-python) dependency for the dcm4che3 option is a working java runtime. Further details on installation and use are available here.

The DICOM server must support the dicom c-find and c-get protocols (not just c-move). This is the case for the dcm4chee server, though several other common servers do not as yet support c-get. In addition, dcmfetch supports access to servers such as orthanc using the QIDO-RS and WADO-RS web REST APIs instead.

DICOM servers are identified by keys in the configuration file dcmnodes.cf. This file encodes the server details (AET, host, port) together with a string representing facilities supported by the server (including the web API if available). This file may be installed to the directory /etc on a unix system, but as it may contain credentials for rest apis it is better installed to the per user location ~/.config/dcmfetch/.

As well as the python package dcmfetch, two utilities are provided: dcmfetch a command line program to retrieve series and dcmfetchtool a PyQt based graphical tool.

Licences

This package is made available under the MIT licence. The included dcm4che3 programs are distributed under the Mozilla public licence; the only modification here has been to bundle them into single executables.