DICOM configuration management

Tele-radiology is one of the most evolved areas of telemedicine. The DICOM standard (digital imaging and communications in medicine) is commonly used for this, but it is not sufficient in all aspects. The mechanism presented in this paper allows the dynamic assignment of an IP address and automatic configuration of devices connected over the network. When DICOM was written only static IP addresses existed (before DHCP etc.) therefore it does not take this possibility into consideration. Currently DICOM assumes that only a small manageable number of devices will be used on a network and it currently requires every device to have a static IP address. At present, each is configured manually by an engineer entering the information into each machine independently (like people used to with a hosts file, before DNS was invented).