DICOM

DICOM, or Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine is the international standard for handling, storing, printing, and transmitting information in medical images and related information.

DICOM includes file formats definition for medical images that can be easily exchanged with patient data and medical image data for clinical use, such as 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. A network communications protocol is also included within DICOM, using TCP/IP to communicate between systems.

You may read, view, process and convert DICOM into other formats supported across multiple development environment and platforms with Yiigo.Image for .NET and Yiigo .NET DICOM Plugin.

In the process of medical imaging informatics development and PACS, it was difficult to exchange medical imaging and related information due to different manufacturers of computed tomography or magnetic resonance imaging devices, ACR and NEMA wanted to solve this problem.

In 1985, the first standard, ACR/NEMA 300, was released. However, in 1993 the third version of the standard was released and its name was then changed to "DICOM". As time goes on, tens of thousands of imaging devices in use, DICOM has become one of the most widely deployed healthcare messaging standards in the world. It enables the integration of advanced medical imaging applications, such as scanners, servers, workstations, printers, and network hardware from multiple manufacturers into a picture archiving and communication system (PACS) and makes medical imaging work for doctors and for patients.

DICOM uses the same file format in both filing and on the web. Differ from others, data formats of DICOM group information into sets. That means you can never separate a medical image from your patient ID within the file by mistake.

Often, a DICOM files begins with a number of imaging attributes containing the image pixel data. A single DICOM only has one attribute, but this attribute may have multiple "frames" to store dynamic images and other complex graph form. Support data compression, all the Pixel data can be compressed schemes, such as JPEG, JPEG Lossless, JPEG 2000, and Run-length encoding (RLE). LZW (zip).