How to write a DICOM's Application in PHP

Question

Hi guys, I would like to develop an Application in PHP that would be able to receive DICOM images from different DICOM's Devices connected to the same LAN.

I know there are some projects to work with DICOM and PHP, however AFAIK those projects don't support sending and receiving images through network.

I would like to know if you know if it's possible to develop an Application like this one with PHP. I would like to know if you've been working with PHP and DICOM and your experiences about this topic.

Thanks in advance. Juan

Answer 1

I've worked with DICOM datasets in the past, but not using PHP.

First thing I'd say: DICOM data is really big so try to minimise the amount of transfer as it's going to be slow.

If there are already PHP projects out there for reading and manipulating DICOM then I would take one of these projects that you know works and meets your needs and then write a separate piece of code to transfer the DICOM data to where you need it. I stress the separate there as you don't want to tie in your data transfer code with the reading/manipulation code, keep it separated out to keep your code base maintainable.

Presumably the existing PHP DICOM projects are able to load file(s) from disk so why not write your transfer code to receive/get files and write them to disk locally? You don't need to touch the existing reading/writing code.

PHP's copy function might be a good place to start for transferring your files: http://php.net/manual/en/function.copy.php