Comparative performance investigation of DICOM C-STORE and DICOM HTTP-based requests

Area of Science:

• Medical Imaging
• Health Informatics
• Network Protocols

Background:

• Physicians increasingly require access to clinical images across multiple healthcare organizations.
• DICOM (Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine) protocols are used for image transfer.
• Traditional DICOM C-STORE transactions can be inefficient for large datasets due to numerous negotiations.

Purpose of the Study:

• To compare the performance of DICOM C-STORE transactions with HTTP-based DICOM protocols.
• To evaluate the efficiency of the STOW protocol for transferring large DICOM datasets.

Main Methods:

• Performance comparison between DICOM C-STORE and STOW (an HTTP-based DICOM protocol).
• Evaluation focused on transfer time for datasets containing thousands of DICOM objects, such as functional MRI data.

Main Results:

• The STOW protocol demonstrated significantly improved transfer times compared to DICOM C-STORE.
• Transfer time was reduced by approximately 50% when using STOW for large DICOM datasets.

Conclusions:

• The STOW protocol offers a more efficient method for transferring large clinical image datasets.
• Adoption of HTTP-based protocols like STOW can enhance the accessibility and transfer speed of medical imaging data across institutions.