DICOM

Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine — is the international standard for the communication and management of medical images and related information (ISO 12052). It defines the formats for medical images that can be exchanged with the data and quality necessary for clinical use and informatics. DICOM is implemented in almost every radiology, cardiology imaging, and radiotherapy device (X-ray, CT, MRI, Ultrasound, etc.), and increasingly in devices in other medical domains such as ophthalmology, dermatology, endoscopy, pathology, dentistry and any other clinical specialities that depend on visbile light imaging.

With tens of thousands of imaging devices in use, DICOM is one of the most widely deployed healthcare messaging standards in the world. There are literally billions of DICOM images currently in use for clinical care. Since its first publication in 1993, DICOM has revolutionized the practice of radiology, allowing the replacement of x-ray film with a fully digital workflow. From the emergency department, to cardiac stress testing, to breast cancer detection, DICOM is the standard that makes medical imaging work — for doctors and for patients and for research and machine learning opportunities.