A Community-Driven Validation Service for Standard Medical Imaging Objects

TL;DR

This paper introduces a community-driven web service for validating DICOM medical imaging data, ensuring compliance, data quality, and privacy without complex setup, thereby improving healthcare system interoperability.

Contribution

It presents a novel, user-friendly, shareable web validation tool for DICOM data that requires no setup and maintains patient privacy, addressing limitations of existing solutions.

Findings

Enables easy, shared validation of DICOM data

Preserves patient privacy through client-side de-identification

Facilitates community collaboration on data quality issues

Abstract

Digital medical imaging laboratories contain many distinct types of equipment provided by different manufacturers. Interoperability is a critical issue and the DICOM protocol is a de facto standard in those environments. However, manufacturers' implementation of the standard may have non-conformities at several levels, which will hinder systems' integration. Moreover, medical staff may be responsible for data inconsistencies when entering data. Those situations severely affect the quality of healthcare services since they can disrupt system operations. The existence of software able to confirm data quality and compliance with the DICOM standard is important for programmers, IT staff and healthcare technicians. Although there are a few solutions that try to accomplish this goal, they are unable to deal with certain situations that require user input. Furthermore, these cases usually require the setup of a working environment, which makes the sharing of validation information more difficult. This article proposes and describes the development of a Web DICOM validation service for the community. This solution requires no configuration by the user, promotes validation results share-ability in the community and preserves patient data privacy since files are de-identified on the client side.