DICOM Validation Sets: A DICOM Test Case Preparation Method for System Integration in Radiology

With the advances of DICOM standard, DICOM conformance test becomes more and more important. In real Radiology system integration test, because of the complexity and flexibility of the DICOM standard, the test cases are very complex and in most test situation the test case is not abundant. Sometimes some integration problems can not be found or be resolved only because the test case is not enough. Based on a detailed analysis of DICOM standard, this paper brings forward a DICOM validation sets method to prepare DICOM test case for system integration in radiology before test. To broaden the validation sets´ accessibility, the extensible markup language (XML) is used to encode the validation sets. Two kinds of validation sets: flow validation sets and data validation sets are presented. For clearness, one use case: the DICOM validation system is firstly introduced.