Object-oriented design of the DICOM standard and its application to cardiovascular imaging

Following the lead of the American College of Radiology, the DICOM (Digital Imaging and Communication in Medicine) standard was recently adopted by the cardiology community, and implementations of this standard for cardiovascular imaging systems are now emerging. DICOM offers the promise of exchangeability of medical images from different manufacturers and across heterogeneous systems. To ensure that we achieve this goal and the proliferation of the standard, it is important to make robust and flexible implementations available to system developers. This paper presents an object-oriented design and implementation of a class hierarchy for the exchange of X-ray angiographic image data using the DICOM standard. The software has been implemented as a toolkit of objects written in the C++ programming language, and is currently being used in the validation of a system for remote consultation of cardiovascular image sequences as part of a European Community project