The Conversion Between DICOM Medical Image Format And Common Graphic Formats

Since 1970, the technologies of computer networks and the medical images have grown quickly. Many vendors have developed computerized imaging equipments which have their own image formats. The result is that their equipments can't connect each other directly and the information resources between these equipments are difficult to use mutually. All these incompatibility made PACS face the great difficulties. Therefore, the DICOM standard came to play.The DICOM standard was created by the National Electrical Manufacturers Association (NEMA) and the American College of Radiology (ACR) to ease the distribution and exchange of medical images. DICOM comes with the popularity of the computerized medical equipments and the development of the medical management information systems (especially PACS and remote medical systems). The aim of the DICOM standard is to improve the cooperation among the medical imaging equipments. It makes the uniform archiving and communication of images of the medical devices from different venders possible.PACS should abide by DICOM. The medical imaging devices which conform to DICOM can connect to PACS as the independent nodes, and communicate with other nodes in PACS. DICOM 3.0 has been supported by the important manufacturers all over the world. With the understanding and use of more and more hospitals to PACS, when these hospitals want to buy medical devices, they have regarded DICOM standard as the important requirement. However, in our country, there still exist many medical imaging devices which do not conform to DICOM. In order to connect these equipment to DICOM-based PACS and make the popular image softwares display DICOM images, the conversion mini-software DCMConverter between DICOM medical image format and common graphic formats is designed and implemented.This thesis can be devided into four parts. In the first part ,the features about three medical images(CT,MRI and US) are mainly introduced.The second part talks about the important DICOM standard and emphasizes the DICOM file header, data recordsets, data elements, transfer syntax and image information modal.The third part introduces the popular graphics file formats,especially BMP file format, JPG file format and TIF file format. And the last part discusses the design and implementation of the conversion software.