The Four Pillars of Successful Digital Networking

During the past several years, the term DICOM has become a phrase in the digital world of radiological diagnostics. For image production and processing as well as in organizational and administrative processing, DICOM has proven itself to be the crucial "traffic junction." The demands for a common image and communications standard follow from the development of new generations of digital systems and the resulting derently valid DICOM standard with defined semantics and syntax for the transmission of data and images developed from the tentative initial attempts at providing a general description of the radiological image. In this standard (almost) all obligatory, optional and conditional date and default values are defined and described by identifiers (TAGS).Since medical technology is continuously undergoing development, the DICOM standard must also continuously develop in order to be updated with new content. Only this can guarantee the interchangeability, compatibility as well as the rapid and open data and image communication between different systems produced by different manufactures.