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Getting radiographs in from your equipment

There are three ways to get films from your X-ray machine or PACS into Librevet. Most practices only ever need the first.

1. Let your equipment send to Librevet (easiest)

Librevet gives you an address and a password. You put those into your X-ray machine or PACS once, as a destination. After that, a study you send arrives in Librevet by itself and waits under Incoming in your case gallery.

Studies there are not cases. Open one and it becomes a case; discard the rest. This matters if your equipment sends automatically: it will send every study the practice takes, most of it soft tissue nobody will plan, and holding it in one place is what keeps that out of your gallery.

To set it up: Settings → Imaging → Your address → Create a sending address. Copy the address and the token into your equipment’s “send to” or “destination” settings. Any user name will do. Copy the token straight away — it is shown once and never again.

What your equipment needs: it must be able to send by DICOMweb (sometimes listed as STOW-RS, “web send”, or “send to cloud”). Newer digital radiography systems and most cloud-connected PACS can. If yours only offers a DICOM “destination” with an AE title, IP address and port, it is speaking classic DICOM instead — see option 3.

Nothing is installed in your practice for this. Studies you have not opened are held for 7 days and then deleted. On Pro and Ultra an owner can turn that off — Settings → Imaging → Your address → Keep every study — and then nothing is ever cleared and there is no separate limit on the folder; the films simply count towards your practice’s storage like everything else.

One limit worth knowing: a single send is capped at 32 MB, which is where the platform stops it whatever we do. That is not a limit on study size — a large CT arrives in several sends and is reassembled here — but equipment configured to post enormous batches in one go will be refused.

2. Search your existing PACS from Librevet

If your practice already runs a PACS, Librevet can search it and pull a study in on demand, rather than waiting for one to be sent.

To set it up: open the imaging browser, choose Search a PACS, and enter your PACS’s DICOMweb address with a user name and password.

Two things your PACS must do, and the second is the one that usually stops it working:

• speak DICOMweb over HTTPS (QIDO-RS and WADO-RS);
• allow a browser at librevet.com to talk to it, by adding Librevet to its CORS allowlist. A PACS that has never been asked to do this will refuse the connection even though the address is correct. Your PACS supplier has to turn it on.

If your supplier cannot or will not enable CORS, use option 1 or option 3 instead. Neither needs it.

3. Librevet Edge, for older equipment

Plenty of veterinary equipment only speaks classic DICOM — the C-STORE protocol, configured with an AE title, an IP address and a port. A web browser cannot talk to that at all, so those machines need a small piece of software inside your practice to bridge the gap.

That software is Librevet Edge. It sits on a computer or small server in the practice, your equipment sends to it exactly as it would send to a PACS, and Edge passes the study on to Librevet over a secure connection. It also solves the CORS problem in option 2, so a practice running Edge can search as well as receive.

This is an IT job, not a five-minute job. Installing Edge means running Docker, issuing a TLS certificate, opening a port on the practice network, and configuring each sending machine. Budget an hour with whoever looks after your practice’s computers.

Download the Edge setup pack from Settings → Imaging → Your equipment. It is a small zip holding the configuration files and the step-by-step guide, already set to your Librevet address, and it is the whole thing — give it to whoever looks after your practice’s computers. Please do not try to assemble it yourself from scratch. The same screen has an email button if you get stuck.

Which one am I?

Whatever route the film takes

Radiographs are converted to standard images when they arrive, and it is those images that are stored in the case. Patient name, ID, study date and the measurements Librevet reads from the DICOM header are kept with them.