Integration of DICOM and openEHR standards

Abstract

The standard format for medical imaging storage and transmission is DICOM. open EHR is an open standard specification in health informatics that describes the management and storage, retrieval and exchange of health data in electronic health records. Considering that the integration of DICOM and open EHR is beneficial to information sharing, on the basis of XML-based DICOM format, we developed a method of creating a DICOM Imaging Archetype in open EHR to enable the integration of DICOM and open EHR. Each DICOM file contains abundant imaging information. However, because reading a DICOM involves looking up the DICOM Data Dictionary, the readability of a DICOM file has been limited. open EHR has innovatively adopted two level modeling method, making clinical information divided into lower level, the information model, and upper level, archetypes and templates. But one critical challenge posed to the development of open EHR is the information sharing problem, especially in imaging information sharing. For example, some important imaging information cannot be displayed in an open EHR file. In this paper, to enhance the readability of a DICOM file and semantic interoperability of an open EHR file, we developed a method of mapping a DICOM file to an open EHR file by adopting the form of archetype defined in open EHR. Because an archetype has a tree structure, after mapping a DICOM file to an open EHR file, the converted information is structuralized in conformance with open EHR format. This method enables the integration of DICOM and open EHR and data exchange without losing imaging information between two standards.