Example: Pathology images

This example examines the scenario where NilRead is used for reviewing whole slide microscopy images, which are encoded using the “Big TIFF” format. While NilRead supports the transcoding of these images into DICOM, this process may take hours depending on the actual image size. A pathology modality imports data to NilRead by just copying images and the related metadata into a shared folder. NilRead watches the folder and makes new data available for viewing as soon as it arrives. Transcoding to DICOM is performed as a background task; when complete, a generated DICOM series should be routed to PACS.

The NilRead folder watcher service is configured using TIFF Import endpoints. To implement the policy in this example, we need to create a TIFF Import endpoint (which we will name WSM Images) and provide the path of the shared folder. As soon as the endpoint is defined, it will be available in the policy editor as a data origin option.

After creating the endpoint, we can define a data lifecycle policy as shown below:

This policy states that when a new TIFF image is uploaded to the WSM Images folder and the metadata is processed, the image will be moved to the NilRead repository (local storage). Then after 1 hour NilRead will start conversion of the image to a DICOM series. When done, NilRead will route the series to CONQUESTSRV1. The series will be retained for 2 weeks and then recycled.