DICOM media interchange standards for cardiology: initial interoperability demonstration.

The first multi-vendor demonstration of digital exchange of cardiac image data was held in conjunction with the annual scientific sessions of the American College of Cardiology (ACC) in March, 1995. This was the culmination of several years of effort by the ACC to help extend the DICOM standard to be suitable for cardiac images exchanged on removeable media. The software was designed to help system implementors with little or no DICOM experience quickly acquire this technology. File content can be specified and manipulated in human-readable form, and converted as needed to its binary equivalent. Images were selected from those submitted from a variety of sources, and a recordable CD (CD-R) created with 30 echocardiograms and 30 angiograms). A prototype display program was created that reads the DICOM directory ("DICOMDIR"), allows user interaction, and decompresses the image files. This paper describes the ACC's interoperability demonstration with 29 vendors, the CD-R of images that was used, and the software used by the participants.