DICOM

Overview

DICOM - Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine - is the international standard for medical images and related information (ISO 12052). It defines the formats for medical images that can be exchanged with the data and quality necessary for clinical use. DICOM is implemented in almost every radiology, cardiology imaging, and radiotherapy device (X-ray, CT, MRI, ultrasound, etc.), and increasingly in devices in other medical domains such as ophthalmology and dentistry. From the emergency department, to cardiac stress testing, to breast cancer detection, DICOM is the standard that makes medical imaging work — for doctors and for patients.

Data Format

DICOM differs from some, but not all, data formats in that it groups information into data sets. That means that a file of a chest x-ray image, for example, actually contains the patient ID within the file, so that the image can never be separated from this information by mistake. This is similar to the way that image formats such as JPEG can also have embedded tags to identify and otherwise describe the image.

A DICOM data object consists of a number of attributes, including items such as name, ID, etc., and also one special attribute containing the image pixel data (i.e. logically, the main object has no "header" as such: merely a list of attributes, including the pixel data). A single DICOM object can have only one attribute containing pixel data. For many modalities, this corresponds to a single image. But note that the attribute may contain multiple "frames", allowing storage of cine loops or other multi-frame data.

DICOM uses three different Data Element encoding schemes. With Explicit Value Representation (VR) Data Elements, for VRs that are not OB, OW, OF, SQ, UT, or UN, the format for each Data Element is: GROUP (2 bytes) ELEMENT (2 bytes) VR (2 bytes) LengthInByte (2 bytes) Data (variable length).

DICOM Connector

The GreenVulcano^® ESB DICOM connector enables the operations that can be performed on a DICOM object. The use of the connector joint with the peculiarities of the GreenVulcano^® ESB Virtual Layer allows the management of DICOM applications in a simple and efficient way, separating the logic of the process implementation from the specific management of the messages and their structure, independently from the DICOM standard used. Basically the connector allows the virtualization of the input/output operations to a DICOM application, making available to the service definition process the interfaces able to hide all the technical details related to DICOM standard.

Outbound DICOM Connector

The DICOM services implemented by the connector are :

• Echo
• Find
• Move
• Store