DICOM - PACS networking

We are developing a medical device used in remote locations, which • Take patent details and photos, • Connect to hospital PACS through Internet - with proper security/encryption of course, and send the package to PACS into their triage process. Such a package will join their patient queue, and be treated exactly as patients who are physically in the emergency ward. • Periodically our device will query the remote PACS and ask "what is the position of our package in your queue", and get told "you have seven patients in front of you" or something similar. • When an expert in hospital looks at the patient details and photos, he makes some diagnosis and recommendations, which is communicated back to our remote instrument. I am very experienced in programming, but I have no prior medical background and I know nothing about DICOM. I used to be very good at Visual C++, but haven’t done it for 8 years so I suspect that there will be a lot to pick up and struggle. We need you to 1. Recommend a proper DICOM SDK - open source preferred, one-off license also acceptable, but per-unit redistribution fee not considered. C# preferred, but C++ also acceptable. 2. Build a Visual Studio project with DCMTK incorporated. Create a single DICOM proxy class, with simple public methods such as void SendPackageToPACS(string strPatientName, DateTime dtDob, string strZippedPackagePath), where the zip file contains a text file with all patient details and a number of JEPG photos. int GetPatientQueuePosition(string strPatientName, DateTime dtDob) string GetDiagnosisAndRecommendation() You are most experienced in DICOM so if you anticipate we are going to need other methods on this proxy class please add it. This proxy class takes configurations from an XML configuration file, such as AE title of the remote PACS, IP address, port, log file path, etc. Inside the methods you do DICOM communications. When errors happen, it retrieves an informative error message, log it, then throw exception with the error message. The whole project should contain this single proxy class, plus a testing main() to test invoke this proxy class. The whole project should build and run OK. This way someone who knows nothing about DICOM can invoke this proxy class to communicate to the remote PACS without using any DCMTK-specific data structures. The delivery to us should be an zip file of a single folder, containing everything – the Visual Studio project files, with DCMTK and other external DLLs (such as WinSock) already in place - if the external file is too big then indicate in the instruction the exact URL to download and how to install it. This folder can be dumped to anywhere on my PC. I can open it, double click the sln file, Visual Studio opens, I hit F5, it should build and run the test successfully. Inside the proxy class there must be very detailed in-line documentation, targeting someone who knows nothing about DICOM, telling not just what it is doing but also why. Effort estimate: 1 day. 3. Step-by-step instruction starting from a clean virtual machine installation with nothing but a Visual Studio Express 2012. Goes through all software that needs to be downloaded and installed, options to take during the installation, where files should be copied to, what Visual Studio project settings/properties needs to be changed, what C++ header files needs to be created or changed, ..., until the project is built and run. Effort estimate: 1 day. Contingency: 1 day. Total effort estimate: 3 days.