Digital medical imaging laboratories contain many distinct types of equipment
provided by different manufacturers. Interoperability is a critical issue and
the DICOM protocol is a de facto standard in those environments. However,
manufacturers' implementation of the standard may have non-conformities at
several levels, which will hinder systems' integration. Moreover, medical staff
may be responsible for data inconsistencies when entering data. Those
situations severely affect the quality of healthcare services since they can
disrupt system operations. The existence of software able to confirm data
quality and compliance with the DICOM standard is important for programmers, IT
staff and healthcare technicians. Although there are a few solutions that try
to accomplish this goal, they are unable to deal with certain situations that
require user input. Furthermore, these cases usually require the setup of a
working environment, which makes the sharing of validation information more
difficult. This article proposes and describes the development of a Web DICOM
validation service for the community. This solution requires no configuration
by the user, promotes validation results share-ability in the community and
preserves patient data privacy since files are de-identified on the client
side.Comment: Computer Standards & Interfaces, 201
