Popis: |
The DICOM standard has been used successfully to exchange medical images for some time. However, the important aspect of image display consistency has mostly been disregarded in the past, which led to inconsistent implementations. This situation is changing now since DICOM has defined a set of services which guarantee the consistency of grayscale images for both hardcopy and softcopy. We have developed a test environment that helps to evaluate the conformance of an implementation of these new services. This environment consists of a set of test images and presentation states for softcopy displays as well as a number of test cases for hardcopy devices. The purpose of each test as well as the expected output are documented. Images and presentation states can also be visualized by means of a reference implementation, a DICOM presentation state and an image viewer that also allows to visualize print jobs. In our experience the services for image display consistency are implementable and work very well, however, there are some small details that can be subject to different interpretations. The test environment does not cover all possible cases but definitely helps making an implementation more conformant with the DICOM standard. The test suite is made available on the Internet as Open Source. |