What is DICOM and How Did it Evolve?
Digital Imaging and Communication in Medicine, more commonly known as DICOM, is the official standard for printing, storing, transmitting and handling medical imaging. It’s not uncommon for healthcare industry employees to ask, “what is DICOM?” However, for healthcare IT workers, especially those working in and around radiology, DICOM comes up often.
The beauty of DICOM is that it enables workstations, printers, network hardware, scanners and multiple manufacturers a way to integrate into a picture archiving and communication system, or PACS.
The National Electrical Manufacturers Association and the American College of Radiology developed DICOM years ago specifically for CAT and MRI scan images. However, the DICOM Standards Committee now controls DICOM. The role of DICOM has also changed – it now supports a wide variety of medical images, not just in radiology, but in pathology, dentistry and cardiology. The transport protocol used in DICOM is TCP/IP.
The need for DICOM came out of new technology in the 1980s, which focused on computed tomography and magnetic resonance imaging devices, which would generate images, but needed to be decoded. The first iteration of the solution was called ACR/NEMA 300, but it was obvious that adjustments needed to be made. A second version was released three years later in 1988, and it became more popular with vendors.
What’s interesting about DICOM aside from other data formats is that it groups information into data sets. What this means is that when a healthcare professional creates a medical image, patient data is included in the DICOM file. This is vital in assuring that important data, such as patient name, will never be separated from the image.
DICOM has evolved to use three separate data element-encoding schemes. To help with similar grayscale image display on different monitors, the DICOM committee designed a guide to display digitally assigned pixel values. Now, in order to view images on a device, it has to have a lookup curve that is calibrated to the grayscale standard display function (GSDF).
The DICOM exchange has offered many healthcare professionals access to images they need to assist millions of patients. Today, every radiology office in the U.S. is utilizing images thanks to the development of the DICOM standard.
There are a number of levels of support that allow for integration of many image types that are exchanged, accessed and stored. Through the DICOM exchange, these images are shared painlessly, without roadblocks, to the advantage of the medical professionals in very large to extremely small facilities.
The DICOM standard is constantly being addressed to work with the latest and greatest technological advancements. It is for this reason that the standard is only a few months old before it is altered for improvement.
OffSite Image Management, Inc., knows the DICOM standard well, and offers a DICOM image exchange to clients of all sizes. Find out more about our exchange by contacting us today.