DICOM Application Entities

Registering Your Application

Before performing any network activity, your application must register its DICOM Application Entity Title (AE Title) with the Merge DICOM Toolkit. This is done by calling the MCapplication.getApplication() method. The returned application object is the unique instance representing the specified AE Title. Subsequent calls to this method will return the same instance, unless the previous instance was disposed.

If your application is a server, its AE Title must be made known to any client application that wishes to connect to it. If your application is a client, your application title may need to be made known to any server you wish to connect to, depending on whether the server is configured to act as a server (SCP) only to particular clients for security reasons.

Current and potentially future DICOM service classes assume that AE Titles on a DICOM network are unique. For instance, the retrieve portion of the Query/Retrieve service class specifies that an image be moved to a specific AE Title (and not to a specific hostname and listen port). If two identical AE Titles existed on a network, a server application can only be configured to move images to one of these applications. For this reason, the DICOM AE Title for your applications should be configurable.