Skip to content

SYSTEM Cited by 1 source

DICOM (Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine)

DICOM is the widely adopted standard for storing, transmitting, and viewing medical imaging files. It is two things at once:

  1. A binary file format that encapsulates pixel data plus metadata (patient demographics, modality, acquisition parameters, clinical annotations).
  2. A set of network services for exchanging those files between imaging modalities, archives, and viewers.

DICOM is the wire format and protocol that a PACS speaks; HL7 (v2 or FHIR) carries the orders and reports around it.

DIMSE services (LAN-oriented)

DIMSE (DICOM Message Service Element) defines the classic LAN-oriented operations, designed for interoperability and image exchange on the hospital campus: (Source: sources/2026-09-17-aws-building-cloud-native-pacs-on-aws)

Service Purpose
C-STORE Send / push an image object to a destination (e.g. modality → VNA)
C-FIND Query for studies matching criteria
C-MOVE Retrieve / pull matching objects
C-ECHO Verify connectivity ("DICOM ping")

Because DIMSE is designed for the LAN, it is what a modality uses to transmit a freshly acquired study to the local PACS/VNA over a hospital TCP port.

DICOMweb (RESTful)

DICOMweb is the set of RESTful services that let web developers access DICOM-enabled systems with industry-standard toolsets (HTTP, JSON/XML) — the web-native counterpart to DIMSE, well suited to browser-based viewers and cloud archives.

Scale characteristics

A single DICOM object holds one image's pixel data + metadata, and a study can contain thousands of objects: a CT produces 300–2,000 images, an MRI 500–3,000 slices, and digital mammography 8–12 high-resolution images per study. This makes DICOM archives large, append-heavy, and an ideal access-age-tiered workload on object storage such as Amazon S3.

Seen in

Last updated · 766 distilled / 2,225 read