DICOM--current status and future developments for radiotherapy

Today, DICOM is one of the most successful standards in medicine. The standard was developed based on the increasing need for the transfer of digital images between systems of different vendors. Furthermore these images needed to be archived in a system independent format. DICOM has been continuously evolving since the early 80s and is today the main standard in radiology. After the IEC had started an initiative to develop a communication standard for radiotherapy in the late 80s, they joined forces with the DICOM Committee. This led to the foundation of a new working group (Working Group 7--Radiotherapy Objects) that deals with the radiotherapy extensions of DICOM. In 1997 and 1999 the so-called RT extension of DICOM was published, containing seven new objects and related services. Since then all major vendors of systems for radiotherapy have implemented DICOM interfaces that support the DICOM RT extensions. Working Group 7 is currently working on extending the Workflow support for the RT objects. This extension will increase the available services and will improve the handling of DICOM RT data. The developments so far are encouraging and it is hoped that DICOM will be as indispensable in radiotherapy as in radiology.