Full DICOM interoperability in a private dental imaging network: A 10-year longitudinal experience using open-source software
Nielsen S. Pereira, Luis G. F. Santos · 2026
Read Full DICOM interoperability in a private dental imaging network: A 10-year longitudinal experience using open-source software by Nielsen S. Pereira, Luis G. F. Santos (2026) in the Tower of Babel, a free online library of public-domain works preserved in clean, searchable text. No sign-up. The full text is served as a plain-text file at a predictable URL, where text is present: https://antarctic-labs.com/tower-of-babel/pmc-13641962.txt.
Description
Nielsen S. Pereira and Luis G. F. Santos report a ten-year experience building a fully interoperable dental imaging network on open-source software alone, a 2026 letter from a private multi-site practice in Rio de Janeiro. Dental radiology often stays trapped in vendor systems and isolated workstations, even though medicine long ago standardized image exchange through DICOM. The practice built a central archive on DCM4CHEE over a standard Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP stack, with mini-archives at six branches sending images nightly and a VPN-secured setup for remote reading.
Over 2010 to 2020, the network served about 27,400 referring dentists and 190,356 patients, handling over 3.1 million image files totaling about 9.34 terabytes with no downtime or data loss. Avoiding proprietary licenses saved over two hundred thousand dollars, redirected to storage redundancy and backups. The one break in the chain was third-party cephalometric software that forced nearly 39,000 images into JPEG.
Catalog record
| CREATOR | Nielsen S. Pereira, Luis G. F. Santos |
|---|---|
| YEAR | 2026 |
| COLLECTION | PAPERS |
| FORMAT | TXT |
| FILE SIZE | 4 KB |
| VERSION | 1.0 |
| LICENSE | CC BY 4.0 |
| RIGHTS | CC BY |
| SOURCE | Europe PMC |