Overview

Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) is the living interoperable standard for the communication and management of medical imaging information and related data in a vendor neutral way. DICOM is commonly used for storing and transmitting medical images enabling the integration of medical imaging devices such as scanners, servers, workstations, printers, network hardware, and picture archiving and communication systems (PACS) from multiple manufacturers. The base standard includes a data encoding, file format definition (DICOM part 10 file with header elements), and a network communications protocol that uses TCP/IP as a base layer to communicate between systems. Different data exchange profiles and expected behavior of all participants are referred as services (e.g., Storage Service, Query Retrieve Service, Worklist Services etc.). The standard is directed at addressing technical interoperability issues in medical imaging. It is not a framework or architecture for achieving a useful clinical workflow.

The DICOM standard added HTTP transport to make use easier within the web browser and initially called it WADO (Web Access to DICOM Object) and it defined URI based access (WADO-URI) and SOAP based protocol (WADO-WS). Later, the DICOM standard introduced RESTful web services for mobile devices (WADO-RS, STOW-RS and QIDO-RS). WADO-RS covers different retrieve services, STOW-RS covers the storage services and QIDO-RS covers the query services.

Now to be more in align with REST architectural style and convention, standard now calls them studies services that operates on different resources and sub resources such as Study, Series, Instances, Work Items, /studies/{study}, etc. and defines different transactions utilizing the combination of resources path (/studies/{study}/metadata) and HTTP methods (GET, POST, OPTIONS etc.).

In addition, standard added UPS-RS, the Unified Worklist Web Services, Non-Patient Instance (NPI) Web Services to handle Hanging protocol, pseudo color palette, procedure code and Storage Commitment Web Service.

Overview

See Also