MergeCOM-3™ DICOM Toolkit | Product Sheet

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Full support of the DICOM v3.0 standard is provided through a library of message manipulation and TCP/IP interprocess communications functions.

A Cross-Platform, Scalable DICOM® v3.0 Implementation Toolkit for Medical Imaging Application Developers DICOM implementation simplified: A cross-platform, scalable DICOM v3.0 solution for medical application developers which has been ported to over 30 operating system/platform combinations.

Key Benefits
Rapid Application Development The MergeCOM-3 DICOM Toolkit greatly reduces the time to bring DICOM conformant products to the medical imaging market by enabling developers to focus on their product application rather than the low level details of the DICOM protocol. The Software Development Kit (SDK) provides simple, high-level abstraction of DICOM messaging details, and comprehensive sample applications are a straightforward demonstration of programming concepts. For many medical imaging applications, slight customization of the sample applications is the only development required.

Broad Market Assurance Representatives of Merge Healthcare have led or actively participated on numerous ACR/NEMA, DICOM Standards, and IHE Image Integration/HL7 Committee panels since their inception. Cedara is widely acknowledged the leader in DICOM Toolkit development with more than 150 commercial MergeCOM-3 licensees. The Toolkit supports all additions to the DICOM Standard Data Dictionary within six months of Committee approval. Draft versions of Supplements to the Standard are supported in Beta releases of the Toolkit when requested by Toolkit customers.

Outstanding Technical Support The average response time to technical support questions posed to the Cedara Software Toolkit engineering team is less than 24 hours. When appropriate, the Toolkit team includes DICOM background information in addition to the specific answer for the question posed, based on Cedara's belief that broader DICOM knowledge will better support industry interoperability.

Portability and Performance The Toolkit is object-oriented and written in ANSI-C to maximize portability and performance. A consistent API across the wide variety of already available platforms minimizes the development learning curve and simplifies application portability.

Platform Optimization The Toolkit is highly configurable to best support the needs of many different development environments, from UNIX and embedded operating systems to DOS, LINUX, Windows and Macintosh. For example:

• Run-time files (Data Dictionary) can be read into memory at application startup or read from the file system on an as-needed basis
• Large data attributes, such as Pixel Data Values, can either be stored automatically or forwarded directly to the application for customized handling
• Automatic storage is supported either in memory or in temporary files (configurable)
• Objects for the DICOM services which the application requires are loaded at runtime to optimize memory utilization
• Configuration can be linked in and updated at runtime rather than set through configuration files
• Integrated Network Capture to support field connectivity trouble shooting with
  MergeDPM™
  

Key Features

Function Library

Association Management • Static and Dynamic Service/Syntax List • Static and Dynamic Host Information Message Encode/Decode • Integrated Value Representation Conversion • Compression Support • Multi-frame Encapsulation DICOMDIR/DICOM File • File to Message Conversion • Message to File Conversion

Integration/Runtime Configuration Application Registration Network Transfer • Send Message • Receive Message • Search Security Hooks Debug/Logging • Configurable • Integrated Network Capture Simple SR Tree Management

Message Object Database and Supporting Data Dictionary describing the DICOM objects used by the application for network communications. The function library uses this database at runtime to construct, maintain, and validate the instances of DICOM message objects which the application populates with data. For developers needing to extend DICOM by defining their own private services (SOP Classes) and message objects, Cedara Software supplies a manual and tools for integrating private tags and services into the MergeCOM-3 data dictionary.

Example Storage, Storage Commitment, Query/Retrieve, Print Service, Modality Worklist, and Modality Performed Procedure Step applications, accompanied by ANSI-C source code. Service Class User (SCU) and Service Class Provider (SCP) examples are included for each of these Service Classes. A Media Exchange sample application is also included that acts as a Service Class Provider (SCP) and stores received storage service class objects in DICOM Part 10 format, including the creation of a DICOMDIR file.

Compression support is included through the use of Pegasus libraries. On 32-bit Windows, 64-bit Windows, 32-bit Linux, 64-bit Linux, and Solaris platforms, MergeCOM-3 includes Pegasus Imaging Corporation’s (www.jpg.com) PICTools™ MedX SDK to support compression and decompression. Licenses for compressing and decompressing at 3 frames per second are included for lossy and lossless JPEG. A separate license must be purchased from Pegasus to enable support for JPEG 2000 or to remove the performance limitation for lossy and lossless JPEG.

The RLE and the DICOM Deflate transfer syntaxes are internally supported by MergeCOM-3 on all platforms.

MergeCOM-3™ DICOM Toolkit Supported platforms

MergeCOM-3 is supported on a wide range of platforms, including Windows, MacOS X, and most standard UNIX platforms. The following platforms are currently actively supported:

Microsoft 32-bit Windows platforms on using Visual C++ Microsoft 64-bit Windows platforms on Intel EM64T or AMD64 Microsoft 32-bit Windows platforms using Borland C++ Builder 2006 Red Hat Linux on Intel x86 Fedora Core Linux on Intel EM64T processor Sun’s Solaris 8 on SPARC using Sun Studio compiler Sun’s Solaris 8 on SPARC using gcc compiler Solaris 10 on Intel x86 using GCC Compiler Hewlett Packard's HP-UX v10.x Hewlett Packard's HP-UX v11.x Silicon Graphics IRIX 6.5 MacOS X on PowerPC MacOS X on PowerPC and Intel x86 (Universal Binaries)

MergeCOM-3 is also available on a number of embedded systems including VxWorks. Please contact us if your platform is not included in the list above, we are open to porting MergeCOM-3 to new platforms.