Folder Indexer plugin

Dear Orthanc community,

I am delighted to announce the release of a new plugin for Orthanc, as a byproduct of my research work at the UCLouvain university:
https://book.orthanc-server.com/plugins/indexer.html

This plugin 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. The DICOM files are not copied, so this solution has a very small footprint in terms of storage requirements.

The 1.0 release of the Folder Indexer plugin is available on the official homepage of Orthanc:

https://www.orthanc-server.com/browse.php?path=/plugin-indexer

Enjoy,
SĂ©bastien-

This. Is. Lovely. So many will benefit so much from your work.

Thanks and congratulations on your continued work on Orhtanc, master SĂ©bastien!

FYI, we have added this plugin in the Win Installers, osimis/orthanc Docker images & OSX packages version 21.9.2: https://www.osimis.io/en/download.html

And thanks to UCLouvain for this great plugin :wink:

Great!
Combined to an auto-routing script, that’s a perfect solution to import studies from various patient portals to the PACS…

Hi all,

Adding my radiant folder to the indexer.json did not made radiant db available in orthanc web server.

I thought it was this simple, maybe I’m missing something?

“Enable” : true,
“Folders” : [“C:\Users\user\OneDrive\Documents\RadiAntDB”],

“Interval” : 10 // Delay between two synchronizations

Thanks,

Hi Marcel,

With the latest Windows installers, all I had to do is to update the indexer.json file with this content:

{
“Indexer” : {
“Enable” : true,
“Folders” : [“c:\Users\Alain\o\dicom-files”], // List of folders to synchronize
“Interval” : 10 // Delay between two synchronizations
}
}

And it worked immediately.

You should check the Orthanc logs at startup and check that the plugin is loaded (http://localhost:8042/plugins/)

HTH

Alain.

Hi, Alain… I’ll make the checks and report back. I guess subfolders are included, right?

Thanks

yes, subfolders are included

I guess folder names with spaces are not supported in windows, or spaces should be somehow escaped in the config file. I changed database folder and it worked instantly.

Thanks again.

Hello! Please clarify whether this plugin speeds up the loading of dicom images in the web viewer? I have a folder with more than 6 terabytes (TB) of storage, can this plugin degrade the performance of my Orthanc?
Thanks!

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This plugin can affect the performance of Orthanc in term of loading dicom speed. The mechanism behind this plugin is that it scans all dicom files and mapping the location of those ones to with the database indexes. So when orthanc loads files, it has to look up in mapping table. Because the mapping table is implemented in SQLite, so it slows down a little bit comparing to PostgreSQL.
P/S : I am loading around 16Tb, and speed of viewing dicom images is quite slow.

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Thanks for this great plugin.
1- is there any way to communicate to the indexer through REST API?
2- is there way to make the indexer database engine in mysql instead of sqlite?

no

no

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Hello,

Note that you can always contribute by implementing such features by yourself in a brand new plugin for Orthanc. You can get inspiration from the source code of the official indexer plugin; that’s what is nice with free and open-source software.

Regards,
SĂ©bastien-