Structured reporting in gastrointestinal endoscopy: integration with DICOM and minimal standard terminology.

The interest of the international gastrointestinal endoscopy community in developing standards for endoscopic reporting resulted in a standard lexicon for describing endoscopic findings. It became clear that in order to facilitate the widespread use of this lexicon, a messaging standard which could link images to text had to be adopted. The DICOM 3.0 Standard (digital imaging and communication in medicine) was extended by the introduction of the Visible Light Supplement and the SNOMED-DICOM microglossary. These two standards should expand the ability of DICOM to accommodate endoscopic images and the clinical description of these images.