DICOM metadata aggregation from multiple healhtcare facilities

Medical imaging procedures generate an enormous amount of information that is stored in multiple storage units by Picture Archiving and Communication Systems (PACS). Using Dicoogle and Digital Imaging and Communication in Medicine (DICOM) metadata the authors developed a merging and reconciliation procedure to create a seamlessly unique PACS view. This procedure was applied to the metadata held by 19 storage units of a PACS of a Portuguese hospital centre composed by three branches. In total, more than 36 million images, from more than ten modalities were collected. The merging and reconciliation procedure have proven to be robust and efficient. This shows that it is possible to merge the metadata collected from multiple PACS into a single unified view, preserving the relation between patients, studies, and images, which is essential for large-scale analyses of medical imaging repositories from multiple institutions.