DCMTK Version 3.7.0 OFFIS DICOM Toolkit

wlmsetup.txt file

    =====================================================================
    SETTING UP THE WORKLIST SCP
    =====================================================================

    INTRODUCTION

    The DICOM Modality Worklist Management SCP component in DCMTK (wlmscpfs)
    was originally developed for a public demonstration at the Computer
    Assisted Radiology 1996 congress (CAR '96) as the first operational
    demo implementation of a DICOM worklist server.

    In production use, one would expect a Worklist SCP to be part of an
    information system such as a RIS or a HIS that is used to create, manage
    and delete work items that can be queried over a DICOM interface by
    modalities using the DICOM Worklist Management (MWL) service. DICOM MWL
    does not offer any way of creating, modifying or deleting a worklist
    entry. Since no such information system with DICOM support was available
    at the time, a simple web-based user interface was devised that would
    allow demo participants to create worklist entries, which could then be
    queried using DICOM MWL. Interaction between the Web GUI (scripts
    running on a web server) and the Worklist SCP was through a shared
    directory.

    These scripts were unmaintained for a long time and have been removed
    from DCMTK in 2015 (the last stable release that provided them was
    DCMTK 3.6.0). This bit of history explains, however, the directory
    structure used by the Worklist SCP.

    DIRECTORIES

    A single working directory must be created for the Worklist SCP,
    for example /export/services/worklist.

    The Worklist SCP supports multiple "storage areas" that are selected
    based upon the called application entity title (Called AETitle) when
    an incoming DICOM network connection is accepted. For each storage
    area, the following steps must be performed:

    - Create a subdirectory in the storage area directory, with
      it's name identical to the application entity title, e.g.:
      mkdir /export/services/worklist/AETITLE_1

    - In the subdirectory, create a file named "lockfile", e.g.:
      touch /export/services/worklist/AETITLE_1/lockfile

      This file is locked with a read lock by the Worklist SCP
      before it tries to read Worklist entries from that directory.
      The file should be locked with a write lock by any application
      that wants to modify the content of that directory, prior to
      the modification. This makes sure that Worklist SCP never "sees"
      an inconsistent state of the directory or tries to read a file
      that is currently being written to.

    WORKLIST FILES

    The Worklist SCP expects each worklist entry to be stored as a separate
    file, in DICOM file format, using the filename extension ".wl". When
    responding to an incoming Worklist Query, the Worklist SCP will read all
    ".wl" files from the subdirectory corresponding to the called AETitle
    and will produce the query response from the content of these files. All
    files with other file name extensions (or no extension) will be ignored.

    A set of sample files is provided with DCMTK. These are located in
    dcmwlm/data/wlistdb/OFFIS. Convert each file to DICOM format by calling
    dump2dcm wklist1.dump wklist1.wl (and so on for all ten files).
    You can then use dcmwlm/data/wlistdb as a valid working directory
    for the Worklist SCP, which contains a single storage area that
    is accessibly by using OFFIS as the called aetitle in the query.

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