Advanced Querying Architecture for DICOM Systems

Radiology, which deals with medical images for diagnosis purposes, has seen a lot of improvements during the last decades thanks to information technology. The migration from studies based on physical media to studies based on digital media brought new possibilities and new challenges. One of the most important marks occurred in 1993 with Digital Image Communication in Medicine (DICOM), a standard used to produce, store, display, process and print medical images. DICOM enabled the development of Picture Archiving and Communication Systems (PACS), complex systems that allow all the major operations needed in medical imaging. In this paper we describe an add-on that brings advanced search possibilities to basic DICOM systems, which usually don´t implement anything similar, since the standard doesn´t require them to. The system we present here is based on a client-server architecture and uses the relational model.