DICOM Basics Description

DICOM Basics

Important: The New Revised DICOM Basics book is available now.

Description:
Learning about DICOM is like learning another language. When you are not familiar with that language, you don’t understand what people talk about. The objective of the “DICOM Basics” book is to break down the language barrier that exists between the providers of the equipment that have DICOM functionality, its features ranging from very simple to a full range of sophisticated services, and the user community. See the Table of Contents below. In addition, one will understand what the basic components are of this communications standard so that one can determine the impact of this standard on the operation in an institution. Based on the objective description above, it should be clear that this book is a must for everyone who is involved with the specification and implementation of a Picture Archiving and Communication Systems (PACS) in an institution. That includes IT personnel, biomedical engineers, physicists, radiology administrators, chief technologists, and personnel from radiology, cardiology, etc. The author is Herman Oosterwijk, MSc, MBA, who has been involved with the DICOM standardization effort since its inception in 1983 as the ACR-NEMA standard. Herman Oosterwijk has trained thousands of people around the world on the subject of DICOM. His book is based on his teaching experience and the many classes and seminars. This book is not intended to be a comprehensive handbook or programmers guide for DICOM software implementers, nor is it intended to be a “DICOM for Dummies”, i.e. provide a simple user guide for every DICOM related question. It is rather a simple reference for people who like to understand the basics of the Digital Imaging and Communications (DICOM) standard. Happy reading! Herman Oosterwijk, President of OTECH, Inc.

DICOM Basics Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION ..........................................................	10
History and background ................................................	10
Why is DICOM so complicated? ...................................	12
WHICH DICOM SERVICES DO YOU HAVE? .................	15
DICOM Conformance Statements ..................................	15
Conformance Statements: a closer look .........................	22
Application Entities and bubble diagrams .......................	22
SOP Classes and SOP Instances .................................	25
Service Class Users and Providers ................................	27
DICOM Associations ....................................................	29
Presentation Context and Transfer Syntax .....................	31
Data Compression .......................................................	35
DICOM Network Protocol Layers ...................................	38
Specialization, Extensions, and Private Data ..................	41
WHICH DICOM SERVICES DO YOU NEED? .................	43
Defining DICOM Requirements ......................................	43
DICOM services, a closer look ......................................	51
The DICOM Storage Service .........................................	51
The Query/Retrieve Service ...........................................	56
The Print Service .........................................................	59
Image Management Services ........................................	62
Modality Worklist .........................................................	65
Modality Performed Procedure Step .............................	67
Storage Commitment ...................................................	69
The Printer Configuration Service ...................................	71
Verification Service ......................................................	74
DICOM SYSTEM INTEGRATION ..................................	76
DICOM Gateways and Interface Boxes ..........................	76
Function of the broker ..................................................	78
Image Quality consistency ...........................................	80
Image Grayscale Consistency ......................................	80
Image Presentation Consistency ...................................	83
DICOM Verification and Validation .................................	86
DICOM troubleshooting ................................................	89
DICOM Toolkits ...........................................................	101
DICOM ADVANCED TOPICS .......................................	106
The DICOM Information Model: .....................................	106
DICOM Services, Composite and Normalized .................	110
Unique Identifiers (UID's) ...............................................	112
DICOM Objects ...........................................................	115
DICOM Messages .......................................................	115
DICOM Information Objects ..........................................	117
Security in DICOM .......................................................	122
STATUS AND FUTURE OF THE DICOM STANDARD......	123
DICOM TERMINOLOGY ...............................................	126