This paper reports on an investigation on how to produce a reliable software component to extractcritical information from DICOM files. The component shall manipulate safety-critical medicalinformation, i.e. patient demographics and data specific to radiotherapy treatments includingradiation target volumes and doses intensity. Handling such sensitive data can potentially lead tomedical errors, and threaten the health of patients. Hence, guaranteeing reliability and safety isan essential part of the development process.Solutions for developing the component from scratch or reusing all or parts of existing systemsand libraries will be evaluated and compared. The resulting component will be tested to verify thatit satisfies its reliability requirements. Subsequently, the component is to be integrated within aninnovating radiotherapy positioning system developed by a Swedish start-up, Micropos.While remaining objective, I will examine how the outcomes of my practical cases converge withwhat is discovered in the literature: a massive lack of conformance to DICOM exists amongmedical systems that produce DICOM files. Endeavors by the manufacturers developing medicaldevices are still required to universalize the interoperability proclaimed by the creators of thestandard. Despite that imperfect context, a reliable software component was achieved and ispresented in this report.
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