National Extensions on PDI for Germany - Brief Proposal

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1. Proposed Workitem: National Extensions on PDI for Germany

  • Proposal Editor: Christoph Dickmann
  • Date: N/A (Wiki keeps history)
  • Version: N/A (Wiki keeps history)
  • Domain: Radiology and other imaging domains

2. The Problem

The Portable Data for Imaging profile (PDI) defines a reliable way to exchange DICOM data on media (CD-ROM) with optional web-viewable or other data.

PDI compliant disks may, however, fail to fulfill national regulations in Germany:

  • <unfulfilled requirement 1>
  • <unfulfilled requirement 2>

National regulations also require (?) additional restrictions beyond PDI:

  • a virus-checked CD must not be appended
  • the fallback viewer permitted on the media by PDI must be present and must meet reliability and use requirements such as:
    • <reliability requirement 1>
    • <reliability requirement 2>

There is also an interest in relaxing some PDI requirements:

  • allowing additional DICOM media application profiles
  • directory for web contents can differ from PDI-required directory

3. Key Use Case

The main use case is related to reliable and high-quality digital image transfer by CD-ROM (based on German Röntgenverordnung). In addition, there were numerous practical problems in the field where Radiologists were not able to view image data on CDs they were given by patients or colleagues.

In order to make digital image sharing as reliable as film-based image sharing, a number of requirements and recommendations are stated especially for Germany.

4. Standards & Systems

Affected systems include acquisition modalities, PACS, image displays and image processing workstations.

Relevant standards include:

  • IHE RAD PDI Profile
  • DICOM Media Profiles
  • JPEG?
  • Compression standards?
  • DVD formats?

5. Discussion

The German Roentgen Association (DRG) has initiated and sponsored work on how to use PDI so that German regulations are fulfilled. The result of this work is a non-IHE specification that partly extends, partly changes PDI requirements and recommendations.

Alignment work between the German authors and the IHE Radiology Technical Committee has already resulted in a number of Change Proposals to PDI. However, several issues could not be resolved and these are considered candidates for a German Extension of the IHE RAD Technical Framework's PDI profile.

The file Media:IHE-RAD-TF-GER-PDI_20070828.doc contains the detailed proposal and open issues to be discussed, including all differences between the DRG specification and PDI. Solving these issues should be tackled together with IHE-D and the German authors.

The Brief Proposal "PDI large data sets - Brief Proposal" covers one issue from the German PDI extension feature list: saving voluminous data on CD using the DVD compression mechanism. This requires collaboration with DICOM.

It should be checked if there are results from this work that can be generalized, i.e. are relevant to the PDI profile (international scope).

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