Projects
DICOM
Medical Image Communication Standardisation
Goal
Starting in the early 1990ies, OFFIS has been engaged in the area of the DICOM standard (Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine) for nearly 20 years. DICOM defines rules how medical images are to be structured and communicated via network or exchange media. Before the first official version of the DICOM standard was published OFFIS started with the implementation of the DICOM Toolkit, DCMTK, called “European CTN”. Since then, DCMTK has been very successful and can be seen as one of the biggest and most popular DICOM libraries in the world today.
DCMTK is not bound to a specific operating system but, besides Windows, runs well under different Linux or BSD systems, Mac OS X and others. The toolkit is offered as Free Open Source Software (FOSS). Thus, it is also available for free to vendors who use DCMTK for testing or implementing commercial products like medical image archives or CT (Computed Tomography) scanners.
Naturally, by its work on DCMTK, also the corresponding DICOM knowledge was established at OFFIS that is mirrored by many scientific publications within the last two decades. Therefore, OFFIS today is internationally well-known for its ongoing work on DICOM and conducted many research projects in this field. Additionally, OFFIS offers commercial software development based on DCMTK internationally and performs many trainings and consulting sessions every year.
Start Date
01.04.1993