An open source based application for integration and sharing of multi-modal cardiac image data in a heterogeneous environment

DICOM format has been recognized as the de facto standard for storage, transferring and sharing of cardiac images along different modalities like magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), nuclear medicine, computer tomography (CT), digital angiography (XA), digital radiology. However, in many medical environments there is a large need to have cardiac images available in formats (i.e. GIF, BMP or JPEG) that are compatible with widely used office automation applications. The here proposed system for multi modality image sharing and conversion is based on both the standard DICOM communication protocol and the common internet file system (CIFS) protocol. DICOM images from any DICOM compliant station can be transferred to a dedicated DICOM server, which has been implemented using the freely available DCMTK DICOM toolkit from Kuratorium OFFIS. An automatic procedure converts DICOM images into the desired image format, creating at the same time a file tree that allows fast and easy retrieval of image data. The entire proposed framework is implemented using open source software with large advantages in terms of cost reduction and software flexibility and robustness.