Holland goes DICOM

In the Netherlands a DICOM standardisation initiative has been started in 8 university cardiology centres. The centres are going to produce DICOM data-sets that are conformant to minimal data-set requirements. This paper describes the data-modelling approach taken in constructing an application for definition of those minimal data-sets. Based on the initial experiences a plea is made for laying down the DICOM standard basically in a well defined relational database instead of only in a very thick pile of paper documents which are very difficult to access and do not allow consistency checks to be made easily. This data-modelling approach might increase efficiency in several areas of DICOM related activities considerably.