CS 188: Medical Imaging

Authors: Frank Chen, Arvin Nguyen

What are dicom files?

Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) is a standard for handling, storing, printing, and transmitting information in medical imaging. DICOM enables the integration of multiple medical imaging devices, such as scanners, servers, workstations, printers, network hardwares from multiple manufacturers.

DICOM groups information into data sets. That means that an image of a chest X-Ray actually contains the patient's ID.

DICOM uses three different data element encoding schemes.

For more information on how to use Python's pydicom library to read dicom files, see here.