Accessing Imaging Procedure Results Outside the Imaging Department - a Simple Well-tried Format

摘要

A major contribution to improving interoperability of medical imaging systems is made by DICOM. This standard focuses on tasks related to the creation of the results of medical imaging procedures and supports facilities corresponding to those available to the recipient of a photographic negative, i.e. some possibility of post processing. End users increasingly expect to have access to medical images but normally require only facilities corresponding to those of the recipient of a photographic print. There is currently no simple format that supports clinical needs and is generally accepted as appropnate for use by end user systems. In this paper we compare the requirements for end user medical image access with those supported by the Basic Image Interchange Format (BIIF) standard (ISO/IEC 12087-5:1998(E)). This has been widely implemented and tested in the defense and remote sensing domains. It incorporates most of the required features for specifying the presentation of 2 dimensional healthcare images together with superimposed text and graphics annotation. It has flexible facilities for extensions to include clinically relevant descriptive data elements to be added. BIIF can support some aspects of security and safety that are not addressed by existing generic formats. It is concluded that significant benefits could be obtained by the implementation of medical digital image exchange using BIIF.