DICOM Archive Solutions for Everyone
The American College of Radiology – National Electrical Manufacturer’s Association (ACR – NEMA) established the Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) standard to streamline the way digital image information was communicated in a radiological environment among devices from different manufacturers. The standard defines the way radiological objects are structured and exchanged. It is a transfer protocol and file format that is not tied to any software application, operating system, hardware device or manufacturer. The standard was introduced in 1993 and has been adopted widely since then.
There are different types of DICOM solutions, including:
Picture Archiving and Communication system (PACS) that communicate with different third-party systems.
Modalities like CR, MR and CT
Post-processing/reporting workstations
DICOM archive solutions provide storage for the medical images in compliance with DICOM standard. The standard has been revised over the years and become increasingly complex. This calls for the right solution to store and manipulate DICOM information.
DICOM data is sent as streams of Composite Objects, each of which stores an image that may be in multi-frame format. The Composite Objects within a series are linked with identifiers although nothing is used to wrap all the images.
Therefore, a DICOM archivehas to sort received streams into relevant series. It must also check the received objects for syntactic validity and consistency of hierarchical data that gets replicated in the DICOM objects. All images within a given study must have one Accession Number, a Study-Level attribute. Since each study concerns one patient only, all the images contained in the study must have identical patient-level attributes.
The archives are designed to fix minor inconsistencies to eliminate or minimize errors in patient information. A major part of the archive design is to work as best as possible with the data received even when some attributes are not identical. When DICOM objects are fed into an archive, the archive will fix any minor syntactic errors and reconcile inconsistencies.
The archives play an important role in eliminating errors and complying with different standards. So, who can use them?
Picture archiving and communications systems are no longer the preserve of large medical institutions. Dicom Solutions has a range of DICOM archivesolutions that meet the needs and budgets of smaller clinics, medical offices, radiology departments or imaging centers among others. These solutions are available at a third of the normal price.
The solutions include Candelis, Genesis and Viztek among other reputable brands. We can provide various information about DICOM systems. Click here for more details.