Abstract
Recently many attentions have been paid on DICOM which is a standard of medical image communication. Communications between imaging apparatuses provided by different vendors have been made possible by DICOM and have become easy.
In this study we connected medical image acquisition apparatuses and image processing systems to a DICOM file server system. The characteristics of image- transfer between these systems were studied. These systems were connected to each other via TCP/IP on FDDI or Ethernet. Images acquired with the apparatuses (MRI, DR, FCR, and Film digitizer) were possible to be transferred to the DICOM file server and stored herein. Image files in the DICOM file server were possible to be retrieved and fetched with the image viewers (FAINWORKS, POP Net, VOX- BASE, and Dr. View) and then displayed hereon.
The linear model was as sumed for the relation between the time required for image transfer and the file size, to study the characteristics of image transfer. The times were measured with varying different file size for the communications between image acquisition apparatus and the DICOM server and between the viewers and DICOM server. From these measurements the characteristics of the system were clarified.
It was found that the time required for whole transfer process could be divided into two parts, namely, the time for preparation and the transfer time during which data were on the transfer line. The latter depends on network protocol. The transfer time for FDDI was about 1/10 of that for Ethernet. In dealing with the large imaging files such as DR or CR, waiting time can be alleviated by using the high speed network protocol like FDDI or 100BASE-TX.
