DICOM
The standard that runs medical imaging end to end — file format, network protocol, and workflow in one.
In one line
DICOM (Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine) is why a CT from any scanner opens in any workstation: one standard covering the image format, the network services that move studies, and the metadata that keeps them attached to the right patient.
How it works
A DICOM object carries pixels plus a tagged header — patient, study, series, instance identifiers, acquisition parameters — so an image is never an orphan file. Classic network services (C-STORE to send, C-FIND to query, C-MOVE to retrieve) connect modalities to the PACS archive; DICOMweb wraps the same operations in REST (QIDO-RS to search, WADO-RS to fetch) for browsers and cloud systems. Worklists (MWL) feed scanners the schedule; structured reports carry measurements.
Where it shows up in digital health
Every radiology department on the planet; teleradiology and cloud PACS; AI imaging
pipelines that consume DICOM in and emit DICOM-SR or annotations out; and the
FHIR boundary — ImagingStudy references DICOM studies so the EHR record and the
archive stay linked. De-identification of DICOM headers is its own discipline (burned-in
text included) — synthetic studies only, in our labs.