Saturday, February 14, 2015

DICOM's role in the internet world and new release of RZDCX

There's an event held in Israel every year in Hadasa Ein-Karem hospital called IsraPACS. Diego Gicovate is doing a great job organizing it. This year I was invited to say couple of words and decided to ask the question "Where DICOM is going?" What it's role today with all the Internet and cloud technology.

Old lady knitting next to a Renault 4 car
Source: Unknown
(Please contact if you know this picture and or where it came from)

Usually, when I give presentations on DICOM, the introduction, the couple of slides in the beginning,  goes like this: "DICOM is very old, It's very big, It's a bit complicated, but hey, its working!" I have this slide (above) of an old lady sitting outside on a chair and knitting with a Renault 4 in the background. Then I review the parts of the standard, noting that, printed, it probably weighs something like 10 Kilo's and joking that I've read almost all of its 3 - 4 thousand pages. At the end  I show a slide with the poster of Monty Piton's film "The meaning of life" and replace it with the meaning of DICOM and then a slide saying, but hey, 1 standard, 1,000's of vendors 1,000,000's of patients, 1,000,000,000's of images, it can't be so bad, look, its working!