The DICOM Explorer is a software that has been developed for the purpose of the Gaster project by Olympus Software Europe and allows the creation of DICOM objects made of endoscopic images and their description with the Minimal Standard Terminology. The DICOM Explorer is fully compatible with the Visible Light Module of the DICOM 3.0 (Supplement 16). In the DICOM Explorer, the data of the image and the text data are tagged with DICOM tags and stored within an object that is then transferred, using TCP/IP to the accepting database.
The DICOM Explorer is a tool for communication between different systems that are able to use this format for exchange of data. The originality of the DICOM is in the fact that the data are taken from the original database, arranged in an object that fully describes the image in the exchange format of the DICOM 3.0 (Supplement 16 for Visible Light) and merges text data coming from the Minimal Standard Terminology to describe the content of the image.
For the purpose of the Gaster project, the DICOM Explorer has been used as a tool to communicate with the central database and send images to it. This communication is established using the TCP/IP protocol. The DICOM Explorer has a flexible architecture, so that it can be adapted to different types of users, enabling for example, the transmission of patient's data, which was not the case in the Gaster project for confidentiality purposes.
In the DICOM Explorer, the number of data fields is also flexible. Besides the main fields that contain the mandatory data describing the image itself, a lot of other fields can be customised, according to the user.
The DICOM Explorer has been used by 10 University centres using different endoscopic workstations to send images to the database in Toulouse.