Medical patient folderΒΆ

DICOM is a software integration standard that is used in Medical Imaging. All modern medical imaging systems (aka Imaging Modalities) equipment like X-Rays, Ultrasounds, CT (Computed Tomography), and MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging) support DICOM and use it extensively. The core of DICOM is a file format and a networking protocol.

All Medical Images are saved in DICOM format. Medical Imaging Equipment creates DICOM files. Doctors use DICOM Viewers, computer software applications that can display DICOM images.

DICOM files contain more than just images. Every DICOM file holds patient information (name, ID, sex and birth date), important acquisition data (e.g., type of equipment used and its settings), and the context of the imaging study that is used to link the image to the medical treatment it was part of.

Roni Z. 2011. Introduction to DICOM [1]:

[1]Roni Z. 2011. Introduction to DICOM. Introduction. http://dicomiseasy.blogspot.fr/2011/10/introduction-to-dicom-chapter-1.html

The objects representing the medical patient data In FW4SPL are aligned with the DICOM standard. In the library fwMedData several structures and values have been retrieved:

  • Patient: name, primary hospital identification number, birth date and sex.
  • Study: unique identifier of the study, study date and time, referring physician, institution-generated description, age of the patient.
  • Equipment: institution where the equipment that produced the composite instances is located.
  • Series: unique identifier of the series, type of equipment that originally acquired the data used to create this series, series date and time, series description, name of the physician(s) administering the series.

In FW4SPL, the class Series is the main structure and contains pointers to Patient, Study and Equipment structure. The class SeriesDB is a container holding several instances of the Series class.

To specify an object of type Series, the library fwMedData holds the following classes inherited from Series:

  • ImageSeries which corresponds to the image series of DICOM (CT images, MRI images, etc).
  • ModelSeries which corresponds to the meshes series of DICOM and also represents 3D patient models.

The fwMedData library also provides a custom series called ActivitySeries. An ActivitySeries is a Series linked to an activity (sub part an application). Hence it is possible to save the state of all the objects used in the activity. Further application specific parameters which are not referred to an object can also be saved in an ActivitySeries. Application parameters in relation to the patient can be the view point on an organ, landmarks, calculated distances between organ points, etc.