System integration and DICOM image creation for PET-MR fusion

Area of Science:

• Medical Imaging
• Health Informatics
• Biomedical Engineering

Background:

• Standardization and integration of medical imaging data are crucial for efficient healthcare.
• Existing systems often struggle to seamlessly integrate multimodal image fusion results.
• The Integrated Healthcare Enterprise technical framework provides guidelines for interoperability.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop a DICOM gateway system for converting image fusion results into standardized DICOM objects.
• To ensure seamless integration of data from hospital information systems and image fusion processes.
• To facilitate precise diagnosis and therapy through enhanced image visualization.

Main Methods:

• Development of a DICOM gateway following Integrated Healthcare Enterprise guidelines.
• Combination of hospital information system data, image fusion results, and generated information.
• Generation of mandatory DICOM tags and two series of SOP instances for PET-MR fusion (MR and PET images).

Main Results:

• The gateway system successfully creates new DICOM objects from PET-MR fusion results.
• Generated MR and PET image series share identical size, resolution, spatial coordinates, and frame counts.
• DICOM images are stored in a PACS server and viewable at the same anatomical location in standard DICOM viewers.

Conclusions:

• The developed DICOM gateway system enables standardization and integration of image fusion data.
• The system ensures accurate spatial alignment of PET and MR images for improved diagnostic accuracy.
• This facilitates precise diagnosis and therapy planning in clinical settings.