DICOM Quickie: Copying a study from one PACS to another using dcmqr (query / retrieve)

Sending a dicom study from one PACS to another is quite simple using dcmqr from the dcm4che toolkit (I am currently using v2):

dcmqr -highprior $FROM_PACS_AET@$FROM_PACS_HOST:$FROM_PACS_PORT -cmove $TO_PACS_AET \
    -L $TO_PACS_AET \
    -qStudyInstanceUID="$STUDY_UID"

It implements a dicom query (here we are querying by study) and retrieve operation (where we are ‘retrieving’ the study to another PACS).

Without the bash variables it might look something like this:

dcmqr -highprior DCM4CHEE@localhost:11112 -cmove PACS2 \
    -L PACS2 \
    -qStudyInstanceUID="123123123.123123123123"

A few notes:

• The -cmove flag says to retrieve the objects to a specified move destiniation, in this case $TO_PACS_AET or PACS2. The AET referenced here should be registered with your source PACS so it knows which IP / port it corresponds to.
• The -highprior flag is optional, letting the PACS know that you consider this to be a higher priority request.
• The -q flag could have been followed by any other DICOM tag value / name. ie: -qPatientName, etc. We chose StudyInstanceUID somewhat arbitrarily (apart from its general usefulness). See the dcmqr man page for more details.

Note: Tested using the dcm4che toolkit v2.0.29.