Many veterinary digital radiography vendors claim DICOM 3.0 compliance with respect to their digital radiographic images. There is, however, no governing body that substantiates DICOM conformance by digital radiography vendors. Conformance with the DICOM standard is entirely voluntary.
During the First Annual Digital Radiography Showdown and DICOM validation, it was determined that although many of the vendors participating in the event claimed DICOM conformance, fewer than 50% of their images actually conformed to the DICOM standard.
This is concerning to anyone purchasing a digital radiography system. DICOM conformance is essential for teleradiology applications and communicating with other DICOM systems. If you purchase a system that does not properly conform to the DICOM standard, your radiologist may not be able to view your images, and you may be in for an unexpected surprise if you attempt to migrate your images to another vendors platform in the future.
During the SHOWDOWN we also encountered as very concerning situation where the images conformed to the DICOM standard but the vendors made the conformance entirely useless.
For example, one vendor came to the Showdown and decided that they would do things their own way but still conform to the DICOM standard. This vendor, chose to fill in all of the required DICOM fields with placeholders (such as putting placeholders such as 00000 in for the patient ID ) but placing the important patient information such as Patient ID in one case and Institution name in another case in a location it the DICOM header where nobody would think to look for it (such as the Station ID field).
I realize that this discussion may be esoteric and without a deeper knowledge of DICOM headers and fields it might not make much sense. Nonetheless, the take home point is that you should try to either obtain a 3rd party verification of your vendors DICOM conformance BEFORE YOUR INSTALLATION or hire an IT professional to verify conformance during your installation. Failure to do so may result in unexpected connectivity problems in the future.
At Animal Insides, we will now be verifying vendor images with the DICOM standard and posting these findings online. The results of the Digital Radiography Showdown and Veterinary DICOM validation are included in this list and can be found by clicking here
Vendor participation in this forum is entirely voluntary. If your vendors’ system does not appear in the list, please encourage your vendor contact me and we will include them. Vendors should also understand that they are able to resubmit images as many times as they like but the images must be sent directly from a working installation at a veterinary hospital.
NOTE TO VENDORS: I will be using the DICOM validation toolkit (http://www.dvtk.org/) during these tests.
