DICOM and Radiology: Past, Present, and Future

摘要

The Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) standard has become the most widely implemented and supported communications standard for medical imaging [1]. The DICOM standard enables health-related computing applications by ensuring interoperability between imaging devices and picture archiving and communications systems (PACS). Interoperability between imaging devices and between imaging systems is not a trivial issue. Physical connectivity requires sharing a complete transfer protocol, but the communication of information content requires sharing the semantic context. Today, it is unusual to purchase an acquisition modality that does not provide a standard DICOM interface for the storage of images across the network. All modern PACS provide a standard DICOM interface to allow the reception of images from modalities. Although at present, it is not simply "plug and play" for modalities to operate within a PACS environment, there has been considerable progress.