DICOM image format

DICOM standard defines image and other data sets, and also data transport protocols and services. DICOM standard is established by American College of Radiology (ACR) and National Electrical Manufacturers Association (NEMA). Part 10 of the standard describes the file format for the distribution of images. At present, DICOM 3.0 is widely used by the PET scanner manufacturers.

Traditionally, DICOM image consists of a folder containing separate files for each image plane and frame. Multi-frame DICOM (MFD) combines all frames of a plane into a single file. Multi-series DICOM (MSD) is an extension to the DICOM standard that combines the whole 4D PET image into a DICOM format metadata file and bulk file(s) containing the image pixel data, allowing faster parsing, transmission, and storage of PET studies (Ismail & Philbin, 2013 and 2015).

In Turku PET Centre, PET/CT and PET/MR scanners, and β-CUBE, produce images in DICOM format. DICOM images are stored in PETPACS.

Carimas™ can process many DICOM format images. Notice that DICOM files from different scanner manufacturers, even from different scanner generations, can be very different. Therefore it is common that a certain DICOM image cannot be (correctly) processed by the software, before support for the specific format is added. With plug-in Nifti Writer installed, Carimas can save image in single file NIfTI-1 format.


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Literature

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Updated at: 2025-06-24
Created at: 2017-04-11
Written by: Vesa Oikonen