Objective: Research in medical imaging necessitates rigorous management of the image databases. Typical clinical trials and the training of AI algorithms require to manage thousands of DICOM instances. The aim of this work is to provide researchers with a standardized way to transparently index the content of a filesystem containing large amounts of heterogeneous imaging data.
Methods: The DICOM standard specifies the well-known patient/study/series/instance hierarchy as a model of the real world. Orthanc is an open-source DICOM server that can be deployed by research teams as their PACS server. We introduce a strategy to use Orthanc as a platform that publishes the content of a filesystem according to the DICOM hierarchy.
Results: The deliverable of this work is an original, open-source plugin for Orthanc that continuously synchronizes the content of an Orthanc server with the content of a filesystem. This way, the filesystem is automatically organized according to the DICOM model of the real world, without any manual intervention. The indexed DICOM resources are immediately available in a Web interface and in a Web viewer, and can be queried/retrieved by DICOM clients.
Conclusion: This work proposes a simple, automated method to publish filesystems containing medical images as a DICOM server.

**Objective:** Research in medical imaging necessitates rigorous management of the image databases. Typical clinical trials and the training of AI algorithms require to manage thousands of DICOM instances. The aim of this work is to provide researchers with a standardized way to transparently index the content of a filesystem containing large amounts of heterogeneous imaging data.
**Methods:** The DICOM standard specifies the well-known patient/study/series/instance hierarchy as a model of the real world. Orthanc is an open-source DICOM server that can be deployed by research teams as their PACS server. We introduce a strategy to use Orthanc as a platform that publishes the content of a filesystem according to the DICOM hierarchy.
**Results:** The deliverable of this work is an original, open-source plugin for Orthanc that continuously synchronizes the content of an Orthanc server with the content of a filesystem. This way, the filesystem is automatically organized according to the DICOM model of the real world, without any manual intervention. The indexed DICOM resources are immediately available in a Web interface and in a Web viewer, and can be queried/retrieved by DICOM clients.
**Conclusion:** This work proposes a simple, automated method to publish filesystems containing medical images as a DICOM server.

Automatically publishing medical images from a filesystem as a DICOM server

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[COIs](https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1nbfwAa9lf9Kz-wAZ7iLKhfpBFjpN_gkn?usp=sharing)