DICOM - Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine - Society for Imaging Informatics in Medicine

International Standard

DICOM is the international standard to transmit, store, retrieve, print, process, and display medical imaging information.

Inter-operable medical imaging information
Integration of image-acquisition devices, PACS, workstations, VNAs and printers from different manufacturers
Developed and maintained to meet the evolving technologies and needs of medical imaging
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DICOM WG-33

SIIM serves as the Secretariat of DICOM WG-33 Data Archive & Management.

WG-33 Co-Chairs:

User Co-Chair: Matthew Bishop, CIIP, Enterprise Imaging Architect, UnityPoint Health (representing SIIM)
Vendor Co-Chair: Keith Eklund, VP Sales & Services, HealthCare Tech Solutions

This Working Group is scoping the problem with DICOM data migrations related to data in static form. Typically, data at rest is stored and not updated at the file level until migrations occur, which is problematic when dealing with large file systems.

As of October 2021, WG-33 is in the process of updating proposed Supplement 223: Inventory IOD and Related Services based on Public Comment submissions, preparing for presentation to WG-06 in early November 2021 in hopes of having it released for Letter Ballot later that month.

In summer of 2022, work was completed on DICOM Supplement 223: Repository Query, Inventory IOD, and Related Services.

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.

Sup223 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.