DICOM Supplement 223 is Incorporated into the DICOM Standard

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Leesburg, VA – September 6, 2022

The Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) Working Group 33 (WG-33): Data Archive & Management, for which the Society for Imaging Informatics in Medicine (SIIM) serves as the Secretariat, completed its almost 3-year work on DICOM Supplement 223: Repository Query, Inventory IOD, and Related Services earlier this summer. After two (2) rounds of Public Comment and one (1) round of Letter Ballot, Supplement 223 was incorporated into the Published 2022c edition of the DICOM Standard on August 10.

“Traditional data migration techniques are less successful as Petabyte class DICOM archives grow more prevalent, necessitating the development of novel data migration techniques. Supplement 223 makes it possible to migrate these huge DICOM archives more effectively,” said Matt Bishop, the User Co-chair for DICOM WG-33 and Enterprise Imaging Architect at UnityPoint Health.

“The industry has relied heavily on 3rd party migration vendors to adapt and improvise when standards have lagged the customer’s migration needs. We have now brought the standard to the forefront of the customer’s data migration and archiving needs. This is an exciting supplement that is specifically designed to make things easier for our customers,” added Keith Eklund, DICOM WG-33 Vendor Co-Chair and VP Sales & Services at HealthCare Tech Solutions.

“Historically, DICOM has been about addressing the workflow of the radiologist, dealing with one or a few studies at a time for image acquisition, management, access, and interpretation for patient diagnosis and care. Supplement 223 is DICOM’s first effort in addressing the management of the image archive as a whole and the workflows of the PACS administrators and enterprise IT architects. We see this as having benefits, not just for the primary use case of PACS migration, but for quality control, AI, and research applications,” said Harry Solomon, the Principal Author of Sup223; Interoperability Consultant for Laitek Inc., and past Co-Chair of the DICOM Standards Committee.

“Committed to advancing technical harmonization within imaging informatics, SIIM is pleased to support DICOM WG-33 in general and this initiative, specifically,” added Cheryl Kreider Carey, SIIM’s Chief Executive Officer.

WG-33 kicked off in January 2020, with the scope of work related to interoperability of systems that archive and manage DICOM data, and the initial charge to determine appropriate modifications to the DICOM Standard to better support “PACS migrations”.

Three years and countless meetings later, DICOM Supplement 223: Repository Query, Inventory IOD, and Related Services accomplishes just that. It adds a new set of features and services to the DICOM Standard to create and manage a complete inventory of the PACS archive that is application independent. “Application independent” means the data is in a DICOM Standard format and is not tied to the proprietary PACS database – it could be read by any DICOM-conformant application supporting this new feature.

Sup223 specifies several approaches that a PACS might use to produce an inventory. First, a PACS may produce a set of objects/files in accordance with the new Inventory Information Object Definition. Production of those files might be initiated by a local user control (the PACS UI), or through an optional DICOM remote service call. A second approach uses an enhanced version of DICOM Study Root Query to allow a robust traversal of the entire PACS database across a series of (many) Query transactions. This second approach fits easily into the architectural and commercial models of many existing PACS and may facilitate implementation.

However, as Harry Solomon writes in his recent blog post, the next step is getting implementation of inventory services in PACS. DICOM is a voluntary standard, and there are no regulatory mandates regarding which of its defined features and capabilities are implemented in a PACS product. The only mandate is customer demand. Therefore, it will be up to PACS administrators, biomedical imaging researchers, or enterprise IT directors, to tell their PACS vendors that they want these new features implemented, and to start planning how to utilize the new capabilities.

Additional Information

• Sup223 is incorporated into the published 2022c edition of the DICOM Standard. A suggested starting point is the informative Annex YYYY in Part 17.
• An extensive presentation on the details of Sup223 is online.

About the Society for Imaging Informatics in Medicine

The Society for Imaging Informatics in Medicine (SIIM) is the leading healthcare professional organization for those interested in the current and future use of informatics in medical imaging. The Society’s mission is to advance medical imaging informatics across the Enterprise through education, research, and innovation in a multi-disciplinary community.

Contact

Priyanka Harilal

SIIM Director of Marketing

pharilal@siim.org