Many times ease of use considerations supersede complete options and flexibility because I take the decision to implement the DICOM internals in a certain way that will be most integrative and still correct. With RZDCX I try to make things easier by providing the very basic API to carry out the task. Because search actions on CD's are much slower then on a hard drive, using the DICOMDIR should theoretically shorten the time required to find and display to the user the information on the media. Its a directory record with information about DICOM files on the media.

The DICOMDIR is exactly what it names suggests. All we need to do then is to read the DICOMDIR file, find the record in it with our patient's ID and get from there the references to the DICOM files that we are looking for on the CD. Doable but slow, specially with slow media like CD, But, when this CD is made according to the standard, there's a better way. If we have no more information then that, we need to open the CD, look at every file on it and check if its a DICOM file, read it, figure out what's in it and decide if this is what we are looking for.

Let's say we got a CD from someone that tells us there's DICOM files on this CD with the information of the patient we are looking for.

What is dicomdir file