The PACS (Picture Archiving and Communication System) market is heterogenous with dozens of PACS providers having deployed installations in healthcare facilities. The DICOM query and retrieve interfaces provided by PACS have multiple variations, related to the implemented SOP (Service Object Pair) Class UID (Unique Identifier), transfer syntaxes, extended negotiations, matching attributes and matching types. These variations make any integration of a new DICOM consumer with a PACS complex and time consuming. As there is no collective information describing the various PACS query and retrieve capabilities, application developers and healthcare facilities lack a method to evaluate the PACS capabilities and classify its functionalities. GE designed a method to evaluate the PACS capabilities in terms of query retrieve functionalities. Our aim is to analyze several PACS in test and production environments, using our method to provide the DICOM object consumers a macroscopic knowledge of query/retrieve capabilities of PACS functionalities and its different variations. Our evaluation can also be used by PACS and VNA (Vendor Neutral Archive) developers to evaluate their query/retrieve capabilities, for quality improvement purpose.

Scale invariance is expected in empty Universe models, while the presence of matter tends to suppress it. As shown recently, scale invariance is certainly absent in cosmological models with densities equal to or above the critical value ρ_c = 3(H₀)²/(8πG). For models with densities below ρc, the possibility of limited effects remains open. If present, scale invariance would be a global cosmological property. Some traces could be observable locally. For the Earth-Moon two-body system, the predicted additional lunar recession would be increased by 0.92 cm/yr, while the tidal interaction would also be slightly increased. The Earth-Moon distance is the most systematically measured distance in the Solar System, thanks to the Lunar Laser Ranging (LLR) experiment active since 1970. The observed lunar recession from LLR amounts to 3.83 (±0.009) cm/yr; implying a tidal change of the length-of-the-day (LOD) by 2.395 ms/cy. However, the observed change of the LOD since the Babylonian Antiquity is only 1.78 ms/cy, a result supported by paleontological data, and implying a lunar recession of 2.85 cm/yr. The significant difference of (3.83-2.85) cm/yr = 0.98 cm/yr, already pointed out by several authors over the last two decades, corresponds well to the predictions of the scale-invariant theory, which is also supported by several other astrophysical tests.