PKI utilisation for PACS users authentication

Masaryk University in Brno is operating a regional PACS archive serving to mostly all hospitals in Brno metropolis and a lot of remote medicine institutions. For communication between modalities (i.e. CT, ultrasound, Xray, etc.) PACS archive and viewing stations is used DICOM standard. This standard was originally mentioned for usage inside one hospital so user authentication relays on IP address of viewing stations. This approach is not usable for communication between hospitals. In this paper we try to describe user authentication we are nowadays implementing in metropolitan PACS archive in Brno.