DICOM file for total body photography: a work item proposal

Abstract

Total-body photography (TBP) has gained increasing attention for facilitating early melanoma detection. TBP has advantages of monitoring temporal changes in lesions, screening a large number of lesions efficiently, and providing anatomical locations for dermatoscopic images. Since various digital imaging systems for TBP have been proposed, there is a need for a unified format for the storage of the data from TBP. Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) is the international standard for medical imaging. Thanks to a considerable effort to develop dermatology-specific extensions to the DICOM standard, there is a recent supplement to the DICOM standard for individual dermoscopic images. This supplement, however, does not cover the requirements for TBP, which may include multiple wide field-of-view images. Moreover, TBP may be obtained using various methods i.e. the images can be acquired with either consumer-grade cameras, smartphones, or an automatic scanning machine. This paper provides an overview of the specific requirements and an outline of a “Work Item” leading to a Total Body Photography Information Object Definition (IOD). The “Work Item” is inclusively designed for accommodating current variants of TBP data to be compatible with the DICOM standard for dermoscopy and applicable to future systems and other potential use of TBP. We verified the feasibility of the proposed TBP DICOM in an imaging-rich full-body scanning system.