Vitrea Connection 9.2

Vitrea Connection 9.2 introduces storage technologies to seamlessly unify DICOM and non-DICOM data on S3 or NFS for streamlined medical imaging and enhanced interoperability.

General improvements and feature requests have been addressed in this release. The following outlines the new added functionality.

General Improvements

  • Support for large video files for viewing with NilRead and Admin Tools: Vitrea Connection can now retrieve large MP4 video files to present to Nilread or the Vitrea Connection Admin Tools.
  • Fixed an issue where secure DICOMweb is not working.
  • Removed open access to Elastic and Kibana.
  • SQL Data Model improvements: The SQL data model has been updated to accomplish the following:
    • Reduce the rate of database growth and related to this, the rate of disk consumption by metadata files.
    • Reduce the growth rate of rows at any given table.
    • Improve performance.
  • Starting with the 9.2 release, the Vitrea Connection ‘downloads zip package’ will not include RPMs provided by official Red Hat repositories due to changes in the licensing agreement. The script “build-centos-downloads” has been renamed to “build-downloads.” The Downloads.zip file no longer includes the OS package. Customers are expected to have a supported Red Hat license for use of Vitrea Connection. 
  • Updated GDPR scripts. With the database changes made for Vitrea Connection 9.2, the appropriate GDPR scripts have been updated.
  • Lazy loading could cause wrong data to be loaded. A correction has been completed for a scenario where lazy loading data could load newer data from the database than the data stored in Java.
  • Improve data processing workflows to facilitate smoother maintenance of Vitrea Connection
    • When using the Routing.xml NIFI flow, there are two flow defects:
    • The PutHL7 processor is missing a successful relationship that connects it to the “Cleanup” processor. The PutHL7 processor now has the correct relationship added so that Cleanup will be performed as expected.

  • A Processor group called “Copy of Copy of My Custom Process Group” exists (cosmetic). Copy of Copy of My Custom Process Group is renamed and removed (there is currently only a single processor within it).

  • Correction has been completed for an issue where the configure-Rialto-firewall uses `read` to iterate over the lines in the firewall. If the final line of the file does not have the following newline character, `read` will ignore it.
  • Correction has been completed for an error where Vitrea Connection fails to ingest studies without date and time.
  • Cleared unexpected WARN message from polluting log file.
  • There have been some tickets in the past for the message “Unexpected attribute (FFFE,E00D) #0 @”, but in 9.1 (and now 9.2), this message appears during every modality worklist query performed against Vitrea Connection. This is a level WARN, which means it will show up in the rialto.log when logging is set to DEBUG level.
  • Platform Packages and Library Updates for 9.2 release
    • Elasticsearch Suite
      • Elasticsearch
      • Kibana
      • Filebeat
      • Search Guard
    • NiFi
    • Zookeeper

Technical Features

Non-DICOM support on S3

In previous versions, non-DICOM data was available only on NFS, while DICOM data could be supported on NFS or S3. For customers who want all their data (DICOM and Non-DICOM) to be supported on S3, the following has been completed: 

  • Improved accessibility of data stored on S3 and NFS devices. Consolidating storage resources streamlines workflows and eliminates silos, boosting efficiency and productivity.
  • Enhanced scalability with support for S3 storage for non-DICOM data, ensuring seamless accommodation of growing data volumes.

DICOM & non-DICOM Metadata on S3

Expanding on the issue above, the Metadata for DICOM and non-DICOM is stored only on NFS. By consolidating metadata in a single repository, greater efficiency, security, and scalability can be achieved, ultimately enhancing the overall data management strategy.

Event Repository Integration

The Audit Record Repository (ARR 1.3) is critical to tracking a study’s life cycle. Previously, it was hosted on Vitrea Connection. With the introduction of the new Event Repository (ER), events created by Vitrea Connection must be reported to this external system to maintain detailed event data.

  • Enhances visibility and diagnostics within the EI solution. Generate critical workflow events from Vitrea Connection and send this data to the Event Repository. This capability is instrumental in pinpointing the source of any issue within the EI solution, facilitating troubleshooting and resolution.

Job Management

During the ingestion of studies, any failed jobs in an error state would be rejected from further processing by Vitrea Connection and placed in an error folder. In all previous versions of Vitrea Connection, the error folder was not visible, preventing the PACS administrator from restarting a job or determining the cause of the error.

  • The Job Management feature empowers PACS administrators to manage job queues within Vitrea Connection. By overseeing job queues, administrators can ensure that tasks are processed efficiently and promptly, optimizing system performance and workflow productivity.

Migration from 8.4.3/8.5 to 9.2

Customers should be able to migrate from a Cassandra DB release to our current SQL DB release. This is not directly tied to the 9.2 release but is mentioned here.

  • Tools are provided that seamlessly reindexes DICOM, XDS, and EMPI data from 8.4.3/8.5 to 9.2 to avoid additional migration services to accomplish this task.