The growing trend towards the digitization of hospitals, especially. In diagnostic imaging , and the need for medical communications, has highlighted. The need to standardize communication protocols and health information formats. One of the most successful standards to date is dicom an acronym for digital imaging and communications in medicine .

What is the dicom format?
Dicom is a standard protocol for communication between information systems and, at the same time, a medical image storage format that appears as a solution to interoperability problems between types of devices.

A medical image by itself does not provide enough information

In order for it to be correctly interpreted, it must be accompanied by patient and acquisition data. Therefore, That is why traditional formats such as .Jpeg or .Png fall short.

The dicom format has iod information Car Bodies Parts and Accessories Email List object definition  objects, made up of the image and its associated information (they are a logical representation of real world objects) and dimse ( dicom message service element ), operations that can be performed on an object. Therefore, Iod and dicom form sop, the functional unit of dicom.

An iod is made up of ies information entities there are ies for patients, studies, series, equipment, images. Therefore, which in turn are made up of one or more modules that in turn contain various attributes. An attribute is defined with name, tag, type and description.

In the dicom standard information is defined by a model that reflects the real world

The image is the information core of a dicom file. Therefore, Each file contains, in addition to the image, information about the patient (demographic and identification identification), the study in which the image was taken, the series to which the image belongs, and CRB Directory information about the image itself.

Dicom allows a unique identification of objects. Each dicom file has a unique uid made up of several numbers.

Dicom communications conform to the osi standard for information exchange. The ae (application entity) is in charge of the communications so that for each service there is a client ae and an application ae.

Gracias a sus características y a su nivel de implantación, hoy día dicom es mundialmente reconocido para el manejo, almacenamiento, impresión y transmisión de imágenes médicas.