DICOM and HL7 are about program to program communication between computers, not a standard file format, and not information retrieval for use by humans.
• The DICOM Upper Layer protocol (DUL) is the language used to make connections, compose, send, receive and decode messages.
• DICOM Services are the operations DICOM programs can do, e.g., send, store, look up information.
• DICOM Objects are the data that programs can send and receive, e.g., patient data, CT, MR and other images, radiation beams, anatomic structure contours.
This post will be concerned with the last of these: i.e., DICOM Objects.
These images can be imported into Adobe Photoshop for a great deal of manipulation and, from there, accessed by Mathlab, which has powerful image analysis capabilities, and finally stored and managed (with search and much else) in Oracle Multimedia. Throughout, Adobe's Extensible Metadata Platform (XMP) - a labeling technology that allows you to embed data about a file, known as metadata, into the file itself - plays an important role.
Click here for more information on XMP.
Click here for an example of medical image processing with Photoshop
Click here for an introduction to medical image processing with MathWorks
Click here for an overview of Oracle Multimedia
and here for the first of several in-depth pages on Mutimedia DICOM
The figure below illustrates the architecture of typical DICOM Web application. Shown only as "Third-Party Media Processors" are Adobe Photoshop and MathLab Medical Imaging.
Click here for an example of a Photoshop and Mathlab collaboration before the advent of XMP
and here for how Mathlab can read XMP metadata today.
Click here for info on work with metadata (Dicom, XMP, etc.) in Photoshop
Finally, click here for another introduction to using Photoshop for processing DICOM files.
