DICOM extensions for narrow-band networks: compresssion of nonpixel data

DICOM is today's de-facto standard for exchanging medical images. Since new image acquisition devices produce more and more image and non-image data, image compression has become an important part of the standard. However, the compression of non-pixel data also stored in DICOM data sets has been disregarded up to now. In the scope of an EU research project we have examined a large amount of real-world DICOM images to test whether or not there is a potential for compressing the non-pixel attributes. As a result we have found out that it is indeed possible to reduce the size of header information in DICOM data sets significantly. However, the contribution to the overall compression ratio is very small. We conclude that compression of DICOM header information is only interesting for data sets which mainly consist of non-pixel data. Since new DICOM modalities introduce more and more of such data, the importance of this issue is likely to increase. Also many DICOM network services are based on more or less large 'textual' data structures. Especially for use with narrow-band networks extensions as proposed in this paper could be a solution to save valuable bandwidth.© (2000) COPYRIGHT SPIE--The International Society for Optical Engineering. Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.