Towards Structured and Standardized MRI Data Archive - Development of a Tool for DICOM File Arrangement in Java

Abstract

To be able to communicate with medical equipment manufactured by different vendors, the vast majority of systems today uses the Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) standard. Although the information of the modality data elements can be made avail-able through specific programs, there are still limitations for the immediate use. Therefore, in this thesis a tool is introduced which consists of two function groups. The first one creates a text file with all the extracted DICOM header information sorted in subgroups and the second function stores the data separately depending the image series in subfolders for a standardized environment in the archive. Furthermore, two examples of images series of a fetal brain exam-ination are demonstrated to show the result after application of the software. In future work, the tool could be integrated in the scanner for the enhancement of the online to offline operation to make the data processing faster and more efficient.