Sources

A source describes a group of senders: modalities, workstations, other PACS, AI services. Routes take instances from a source to destinations. Configuration › Sources.

Who: network criteria

These are checked when a sender opens an association, before any image arrives:

Setting	Matches	Example
Remote IP ranges	The sender’s address	10.20.30.15, 10.20.30.0/24, 10.20.30.1-10.20.30.99
Calling AE titles	The AE title the sender calls itself (* and ? wildcards)	CT*, MR1
Called AE titles	The AE title the sender addresses the router as	ROUTES, ROUTES_TLS
Router ports	The port the association arrives on	104, 2762 (TLS)

Each list matches any one of its entries; an empty list matches everything; every list that has entries must match.

A sender that no route’s source accepts is refused at once, before it sends anything, and shows on the Monitoring page as turned away, with an alert. It never believes an image was delivered when it was not.

Tip

Give every source an IP range as well as an AE title. AE titles are trivial to fake; an address range stops anyone else from sending as your CT scanner.

Which instances: header conditions

Conditions look at each instance’s header once it arrives, and all of them must hold:

Operator	Example
Equals, NotEquals	`Modality Equals CT
Contains, StartsWith, EndsWith	StudyDescription Contains CHEST
Wildcard	InstitutionName Wildcard *North*
Regex	AccessionNumber Regex ^A\d{7}$
Exists, NotExists	OtherPatientIDsSequence Exists

Tags are keywords (Modality) or numbers ((0008,0060)). Comparisons ignore case and padding. Equals also matches one value of a multi-valued element: Modality Equals CT matches CT\PT. Non-standard values such as PET/CT are different values; catch them with Contains, Wildcard or Regex.

An instance that matches no route is refused with status 0124.

What changes on arrival

• Tag edits applied as each header streams in, before the file is written.
• A script, for rules tag edits cannot express: it can edit the header, refuse the instance, or send it elsewhere.

What the source accepts

• Transfer syntaxes: which encodings its senders may send, per kind of image.
• Storage commitment: senders may ask the router to confirm it holds their instances.
• DICOMweb uploads: senders that upload over HTTPS instead of DICOM.
• Query and retrieve: senders that may also search and retrieve through the router.
• Modality worklist and MPPS: modalities that may query the worklist and report procedure steps.

When several sources match

One sender can match several sources (say CT* and CT1); each route uses its own source, and the routes decide in order. Where only one rule can apply to the whole association (the accepted transfer syntaxes), the most specific source decides: an exact calling AE title counts most, then a single address, then wildcards and ranges, the called AE title and the port. The route tester shows which source decides.