Benefits of Using the DCM4CHE DICOM Archive

Abstract

With advances in digital imaging throughout the 1990s and the rapid adoption of Picture Archiving and Communication Systems (PACS) in the last decade, standards for information exchange have become crucial to effective communication, both within the radiology department and with the larger enterprise and outside institutions and agencies. The original Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine1 (DICOM) standard was introduced in 1993 and, in the intervening years, has been widely adopted. Interest in DICOM, as well as the continuous integration of new technologies and modalities into medical imaging, has resulted in a series of new and revised DICOM standards. Along with the growing complexity of these standards has come a need for tools that can manipulate and store DICOM information. In 2000, responding to these needs, JDicom, a toolkit written in the Java programming language, was developed for manipulating DICOM. The popularity of this new tool kit persuaded its lead developer to build a full-featured DICOM archive. The mission of the project was to produce a DICOM archive that was free, open-source, and cross-platform and that embraced new directions being drawn up by the Integrating the Health Care Enterprise (IHE) initiative. This ambitious goal attracted more developers, and the DCM4CHE2 project was born. After 7 years of development, the DCM4CHE project has produced two generations of a DICOM archive. The current generation is the result of learned practical experience and reflects the old programmer’s adage: “Build it twice, because you will anyway.” This article reviews DCM4CHE and the DCM4CHE DICOM archive (DCM4CHEE) and evaluates their maturation as a viable platform for training, integration testing, and research.