THE ROLE OF DIGITAL IMAGING AND COMMUNICATIONS IN MEDICINE IN AN EVOLVING HEALTH-CARE COMPUTING ENVIRONMENT - THE MODEL IS THE MESSAGE

The decision to use Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DI COM), Health Level 7 (HL7), a common object broker such as the Common Object Request Brokering Architecture (CORBA) or ActiveX (Microsoft Co rp, Redmond, WA) or any other protocol for the transfer of DICOM data depends on the requirements of a particular implementation. The select ion of protocol is independent of the information model. Our goal as m essage standards developers is to design a data interchange infrastruc ture that will faithfully convey the computer-based patient record and make it available to authorized health care providers when and where it is needed for patient care. DICOM accurately and expressively repre sents the clinically significant properties of images and the semantic s of image-related information. The DICOM data model is small and well -defined. The model can be expressed in Standard Generalized Markup La nguage (SGML) or Object Management Group Interface Definition Language or other common syntax-and can be implemented using any reliable comm unications protocol. Therefore our opinion is that the DICOM semantic data model should serve as the basis for a logically equivalent set of specifications in HL7, CORBA, ActiveX, and SGML for the interchange o f biomedical images and image-related information. Copyright (C) 1998 by W.B. Saunders Company.