Overview of the DICOM standard

Digital technology has in the last few decades entered almost every aspect of medicine. There has been a huge development in noninvasive medical imaging equipment. Because there are many medical equipment manufacturers, a standard for storage and exchange of medical images needed to be developed. DICOM (Digital Imaging and Communication in Medicine) makes medical image exchange more easy and independent of the imaging equipment manufacturer. Besides the image data, DICOM file format supports other information useful to describe the image. This makes DICOM easy to use and the data exchange fast and safe while avoiding possible confusion caused by multiple files for the same study.