Definition

DICOM (Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine)

Part of the Healthcare IT glossary:

DICOM (Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine) is an application layer network protocol for the transmission of medical images, waveforms and accompanying information. 

Next Steps

DICOM was originally developed by the National Electrical Manufacturers Association (NEMA) and the American College of Radiology for computerized axial tomography (CAT) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scan images. It is now controlled by the DICOM Standards Committee and supports a wide range of medical images across the fields of radiology, cardiology, pathology and dentistry. DICOM uses TCP/IP as the lower-layer transport protocol.

Continue reading about DICOM:

Get advice about DICOM testing and troubleshooting

The DICOM standard enables interoperability, which is considered important to reducing the cost of health care.

This was last updated in March 2011
Posted by: Margaret Rouse

Related Terms

Definitions

  • telepathology

    - Telepathology is the area of telemedicine involving the transmission of pathological specimen images for remote study and diagnosis of disease. (SearchHealthIT.com)

  • Consolidated Health Informatics (CHI)

    - The Consolidated Health Informatics (CHI) initiative refers to a collaborative effort to create and adopt health informatics standards to be used by federal departments such as the Department of He... (SearchHealthIT.com)

  • Clinical Document Architecture (CDA)

    - The Clinical Document Architecture (CDA) is a markup standard developed by the organization Health Level 7 International (HL7) to define the structure of clinical documents such as discharge summar... (SearchHealthIT.com)

Glossaries

  • Healthcare IT

    - Terms related to healthcare IT, including definitions about healthcare information and management systems and words and phrases about electronic health records, meaningful use, government regulatio...

  • Internet applications

    - This WhatIs.com glossary contains terms related to Internet applications, including definitions about Software as a Service (SaaS) delivery models and words and phrases about web sites, e-commerce ...

Dig Deeper

People Who Read This Also Read...

Tech TalkComment

Share
Comments

    Results

    Contribute to the conversation

    All fields are required. Comments will appear at the bottom of the article.
    Back to top