Abstract
Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) is increasingly becoming the industry standard for exchanging imaging data across modalities. This standard facilitates exchange of meaningful imaging data between various modalities. DICOM being a comparatively new standard, many modalities in the medical world are not DICOM enabled. In the increasingly networked medical workflow environment, DICOM standards would play a crucial role in the medical equipment manufacturing industry that deals with medical images. The DICOM service implementation requires transfer of imaging data from one modality to another in a particular format. The implementation approach given below provides a flexible framework to DICOM enable various modalities. It provides a scalable framework for converting the existing data to DICOM standard types.

DICOM mandates certain data to be transferred along with image data and the remaining data is optional. The proposed framework would help users configure such optional data in text files (dictionary) which can be changed at run time without the need of recompiling the application. The underlying premise being that DICOM services would be realized using commercial libraries and the solution would be available using a specific DICOM library. This white paper explains the basic DICOM standards, implementation procedures involved and the benefits gained by implementing this standard.

Author Rakesh Nigudkar

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