Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) as standard in digital pathology

Cancer Digital Slide Archive: an informatics resource to support integrated in silico analysis of TCGA pathology data

“…After mirroring of the data from the public repository, an image conversion process is instantiated to convert SVS-format WSIs into a pyramidal BigTIFF (Tagged Image File Format) format 24 using the VIPS library. 16 As WSIs can exceed 4 gigabytes each (the limit for standard TIFFs), use of the latest TIFF libraries (v4) is required.…”

“…[24][25][26][27] At the time we initiated this project, simply reading these large image files with non-proprietary software was a tremendous challenge. The images made available by TCGA are stored as SVS files, a custom file format developed by Aperio to extend the TIFF.…”

The Emergence of Pathomics

“…Even though there are presently very few digital microscopy vendors who have adopted DICOM, there is an increasing push for use of the DICOM WSI format [61,62]. The DICOM standards body is also working on additional supplements for the capture and representation of digital pathology image and analysis metadata [63] and DICOM Structured Reporting [64][65][66]. As these standards are refined and implemented, we expect that open source and commercial software products will adopt these formats as their default data models for image analysis results to enable interoperability across different imaging and software systems in order to facilitate easier development and integration of new data management capabilities.…”

The Current State and Path Forward For Enterprise Image Viewing: HIMSS-SIIM Collaborative White Paper

“…This spectrum includes DICOM diagnostic images common to cardiology, obstetrics, radiology, and other specialties [ 3 ]. It includes procedure and point-of-care documentation images across all modalities and specialties, such as from endoscopy, handheld dermatology camera, consumer mobile camera, point of care ultrasound and fluoroscopy, and emerging pathology formats [ 4 – 15 ]. Finally, health organizations frequently make some forms of scanned paperwork documentation available throughout the EHR via image viewers.…”