Compass™ is a routing application for DICOM store jobs. It allows the user to route, replicate, monitor, and optionally alter DICOM store jobs. By using powerful routing rules, one can easily route DICOM store jobs from point A to point B. Additionally, by using its ability to apply custom filters, Compass may be used to facilitate the interconnection of otherwise incompatible devices. Modality management is also simplified: modalities need only be configured to store to Compass, which can then store the study to one or more destinations.

Because unrestricted end to end communications are difficult to manage, many facilities use interface engines as central mapping programs; Compass acts in that role as a DICOM gateway interface engine for DICOM communications, serving as all-in-one DICOM bridge, DICOM gateway and DICOM router for these communications. By using powerful mapping rules, one can easily route DICOM store jobs from point A to point B.

Additionally, by using its ability to apply custom filters, Compass may be used to facilitate the interconnection of otherwise incompatible devices. Modalities need only be configured to talk to the DICOM gateway and mapping rules may be changed to re-direct the modality data to a different server. In each case the configuration and mapping is done once on the sources and destinations and reconfiguration can be handled centrally in the gateway.

Features:

• Select routing and mapping rules based on public DICOM tags and/or association information such as day-of-week and/or time-of-day to facilitate institutional scheduling requirements.
• Correct various connectivity problems by defining filters which can add/delete/modify DICOM tags, as well as change their transfer syntax.
• Aggregate a study from multiple inbound associations into a single outbound association, providing advanced DICOM router functionality.
• Route a single DICOM store job from one SCU to multiple SCPs.
• User defined filters may be added to any association, providing the ability to modify or map certain fields before forwarding, thus allowing the user to correct various connectivity problems.
• Schedule outbound jobs to be run during a specific time-of-day and/or day-of-week.
• Temporarily queue up outbound jobs to a particular destination while the destination is undergoing maintenance.
• Masquerade as or make multiple client devices appear as a single device to a server device.
• Ability to alter the encoding (transfer syntax) of sop instances as they pass from one system to another, e.g., a modality stores images to Compass as implicit-little-endian syntax, and Compass forwards those images to a remote archive server using one of the various JPEG or JPEG 2000 compression transfer syntaxes.
• Log and monitor DICOM transactions in a user-friendly, human-readable format.
• Log verbosity that is dynamically configurable via a convenient interface.
• Make multiple client devices appear as a single device to a server.
• Route DICOM store jobs from one SCU to more than one SCP to facilitate testing of new devices.

Benefits:

• Control — Dynamic control of the mappings and related configuration facilitates ease of use.
• Selectivity — Users are able to control and monitor the associations or transactions of interest.
• Flexibility — Optional and configurable logging, diagnostic, and filtering operations may be performed as the messages are forwarded between devices.