A Big Data Approach to Explore Medical Imaging Repositories Based on DICOM

Abstract

Medical imaging repositories based on the DICOM format such as Picture Archiving and Communication Systems have a huge potential from a big data perspective. The study reported by this paper aimed to verify on how the big data lifecycle processes, from production to consumption might be implemented to take advantage of the DICOM standard and respective data sources. After identifying the different processes (i.e., data collection, integration, filtering, anonymization and enrichment, and knowledge extraction) the study demonstrate their implementation using an open-source application able to access the DICOM metadata independently of the medical imaging modalities and equipment manufacturers.