OPV Dicom files from Zeiss HFA II

General
1

Hello community,

I am new to Dicom and Orthanc. We have a Zeiss HFA 745 in our practice and I am looking for a way to transfer the data to an Orthanc server. I have configured the interface on the device and on the server, but I get the following error message in Orthanc:

E0209 07:09:03.936219 DICOM-SERVER CommandDispatcher.cpp:285] Receiving Association failed: Unrecognized PDU type: 0
E0209 07:10:15.319964 DICOM-SERVER CommandDispatcher.cpp:285] Receiving Association failed: Unrecognized PDU type: 0

On the device:
Network Connection error 54.

Do you have any experience with the device and Orthanc?

Thank you in advance.

2

Hi Rob,

These kind of errors typically appear when something tries to access Orthanc on port 4242 with another protocol than DICOM (like HTTP) or maybe with DICOM TLS enabled instead of plain DICOM.

Any DICOM compatible device is supposed to work with Orthanc so you should also feel free to contact your Zeiss support - your probably pay them for that :wink: .

Worst case scenario, record the TCP traffic on the DICOM Port with tcpdump or wireshark and share it here but make sure not to share any sensitive information …

Best,

Alain

3

Hello @Rob - curious if you fixed this - always interested in DICOM connectivity issues - happy to help if you need it.

4

Hi @alainmazy @olivert,

sorry for the late reply.

I found out that the device needs a gateway to send data to DICOM archives. The device itselfs sends CZM-XML files/snippets.

Since the Zeiss DICOM gateway is no longer available, I built a gateway using reverse engineering, and it’s working so far.

I just need to figure out what response the device expects from the gateway so that a success message appears on the screen.

Do you perhaps have any ideas or experience regarding what kind of response the device expects?

Rob

5

Hi,

I have recently made 2 fixes related to integration with a Zeiss server:

They are available in the mainline binaries and will be part of the next official release.

Hope this helps,

Alain.

 

 

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6

Hi @alainmazy,

thanks for the pointers and for the fixes.

I checked them, but unfortunately they do not seem to solve our current issue.

The main problem is apparently not standard DICOM query/retrieve behavior inside Orthanc. The HFA II-i 745 seems to use a proprietary ZEISS protocol for export:

  • for “report / examination” export, it sends proprietary TCP/XML

  • for EMR/PMS export, it writes XML/PDF over SMB and expects a proprietary response/handshake

Our current workaround is therefore:

  1. receive the proprietary export

  2. extract XML / raw data / PDF

  3. convert it into proper OPV DICOM

  4. send that to Orthanc

This already works partially: we can receive the payload and import the resulting data into Orthanc.

The remaining blocker is that the HFA device still does not accept our server/gateway responses as valid, so the device reports incomplete or failed transfer even though the data can already be captured on the server side.

So my impression is that your new C-FIND fixes are probably relevant for later Zeiss query/retrieve or MWL integration, but they do not address the current export acknowledgment problem we are stuck on.

Thanks again for investigating this.

Best,
Rob