DICOMweb

DICOMweb is a term applied to the family of RESTful DICOM services defined for sending, retrieving and querying for medical images and related information.

The intent is to provide a light-weight mobile device and web browser friendly mechanism for accessing images, which can be implemented by developers who have minimal familiarity with the DICOM standard and which uses consumer application friendly mechanisms like http, JSON and media types (like "image/jpeg") to the maximum extent possible.

The standard is formally defined in DICOM PS3.18 Web Services.

The DICOMweb services are distinguished from other DICOM web services by the suffix "-RS", indicating their RESTful nature.

The family consists primarily of:

A key feature of the WADO-RS services is the ability to retrieve entire studies and series rather than needing repeated request for individual instances.

Other services including support for work lists (UPS-RS) and retrieval of server capabilities.

Some very simple examples of URL syntax and meta data encoding are described in the DICOMweb Cheatsheet.

Roughly speaking, the DICOMweb services can be compared with the conventional DIMSE DICOM services as follows:

Indeed, apart from the different encoding of the request, packaging of the response and protocol used, the services are sufficiently similar that a DICOMweb proxy to a conventional implementation of DICOM DIMSE services can be implemented (this is by design). The conventional DIMSE DICOM services even having capabilities that correspond to the instance and frame level (Instance and Frame Level Retrieve) and separate meta data retrieval capabilities (Composite Instance Retrieve Without Bulk Data) of DICOMweb, though these are not nearly as widely implemented as the traditional study-root study, series and image retrieval services.

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