DICOM standards in portable medical devices (1)

In the past few decades is not only the application of digital medical imaging developed rapidly, the ability to share this information, you can also put in a few seconds spread all over the world, this image resulted in these images can be maximized.

Medical digital imaging and communications standard (Digital imaging and communicaTIon in medicine-DICOM) defines transport medical and related information.

DICOM standards is the picture archiving and communication system (picture archivingand communication systems-PACS) most commonly used standards, the medical network system for storing, searching, publication and display of images.

In addition the system also helps hospitals not film image storage and display. So millions of storage in a yellow envelope of film can be 1 to 10TByte of digital storage server instead. Figure 1 shows the major components of the PACS.

All information is centralized in the middle of the server.

From different sources of image is saved on the server, at any time can be used by doctors and staff within the workstation over the network. In addition, the information can also be published to the Internet to enable global access to clinics and hospitals. All of these transport Exchange services are based on the DICOM standard.

Symbolic DICOM

Compared to its predecessor TDICOM standard-United States society of Radiology and the United States National Electrical Manufacturers Association (American College of R ADI ology, NationalElectrical Manufacturer Association-ARC NEMA)-is a major innovation.

DICOM standard applies to TCP/IP network environment of online or off-line, such as the standard media CD-R or external storage device. NEMA DICOM and ARC biggest difference is that it is structured into a multi-part files, allowing quickly add new features.

DICOM files from file header and the image data.

The file header can contain information on the types of patients, the use of equipment, image size, diagnosis, graphics, waveform, and report and other information, to name a few here. More importantly, each file also contains hundreds of images.

Figure 2 is a classic of DICOM files.

In this example, the file header using the first few bytes to describe x-ray line sectional dimensions. The file header size can vary, depending on the details of the information it contains. In this case, it indicates that the file contains 2 picture size is three dimensional pixel picture 201x134 (a three-dimensional pixel (voxel) refers to the three-dimensional space of a value, it can be compared to pixel mean two space of a value). Images and data are saved in the same file.

DICOM standard is composed of more than 20 home healthcare providers, 15 medical users and other medical institutions holding a Committee to develop and maintain.

(See medical.nema.org/members.pdf). DICOM standard at present is the medical industry's most widely used standards.

One of the objectives of the standards is striving to achieve a different type of medical device interoperability between Exchange capabilities such as cardiac radiology equipment and medical equipment interoperability collaborative.

In other words, one of the objectives of the DICOM standard enables the medical staff can be in the same network share from a different vendor-supplied medical equipment on the medical imaging data. The programme will also allow other images and non-imaging medical equipment for access to the net. The final feature we have not yet been fully discovered. To date, most with DICOM devices are non-portable radioactive instruments, such as magnetic resonance imaging, computed tomography, fluoroscopic, x-ray imaging, ultrasound, and other devices. These devices are based on powerful workstations and high-speed processor, mass memory storage capabilities and medical image analysis algorithms. In these large application on the device will receive DICOM standard, while continuing to develop this trend also makes it more portable devices join medical industrialization process.

Household products such as portable ultrasound, blood pressure and heart rate meter, etc. are becoming the next generation of health care equipment.

Them to patients at home provides important health data, but these data transmission to health care are a problem. In the health care field, hours, minutes, or even every second, medical experts, the sooner you get the information you will be able to better provide medical care for patients, reduce the time means the difference between life and death. Therefore, the need to apply the DICOM standard and portable imaging medical equipment for non-images to make them compatible with the existing network systems. Currently, people can easily pass at home or through GPRS cellular service to connect to the Internet. These portable medical equipment is required to use this convenient conditions for sharing information.