1 2The OFFIS DICOM Toolkit DCMTK 3 4In 1993, the OFFIS institute and Oldenburg University, Germany supported by 5CERIUM, Rennes, France, developed a DICOM implementation on behalf of 6CEN/TC251/WG4 as part of a DICOM demonstration at RSNA'93. The software 7started with a early version of the DICOM Upper Layer Protocol facility 8developed by the Mallinckrodt Institute of Radiology in St. Louis, USA. The 9rest of this software was developed independently and successfully demonstrated 10for the first time at RSNA'93. Interoperability was demonstrated with around 1120 implementations from vendors of medical imaging equipment, with both this 12software and the Mallinckrodt Institute of Radiology's own implementation. 13This implementation became known as the European CTN (Central Test Node). 14 15The European CTN software was further extended by OFFIS in 1994 and 1995 and 16used as part of DICOM demonstrations at EuroPACS'94 in Geneva, ECR'95 in Vienna 17and CAR'95 in Berlin where even more vendors of imaging equipment were able to 18demonstrate interoperability. 19 20During 1996, the software was rewritten by OFFIS to use a new C++ based DICOM 21encoding/decoding library and has been supplemented with a Modality Worklist 22CTN, demonstrated for the first time at CAR'96 in Paris, France. The CAR'96 23DICOM demonstration featured Modality Worklist Management and Image 24Storage/Query/Retrieval. The available software includes source code and 25documentation for the worklist management and image storage/query/retrieve 26server applications, a number of test applications, and the necessary 27libraries. A similar industry demonstration also took place at the European 28Congress of Radiology (ECR '97) in Vienna and at CAR'97 in Berlin. 29 30Beginning with release 3.0 (1996), the software package was renamed to DCMTK 31(DiCoM ToolKit). It contains a number of improvements over the "European CTN" 32software previously available from OFFIS/Oldenburg University, the most 33important being: 34 - configuration using GNU autoconf 35 - a modality worklist SCP and SCU 36 - a new C++ encoding/decoding library 37 - support for offline media 38 - support for explicit VR transfer syntaxes 39 - a user-extensible data dictionary 40 - support for all balloted image SOP classes 41 42In 1997, a tool allowing to create DICOMDIRs according to the "General Purpose 43CD-R Image Interchange Profile" was added. This tool was used to master the 44CAR' 97 and NEMA '97 DICOM Demonstration CDs. 45 46Beginning in 1998, new libraries for efficient rendering of DICOM grayscale 47images, display calibration according to DICOM part 14 and an implementation of 48the Grayscale Softcopy Presentation State (GSPS) supplement were added and 49demonstrated at ECR '99 and RSNA InfoRAD '99. Together with an implementation 50of DICOM basic grayscale print management (SCU and SCP, both supporting 51presentation LUT) and a small GSPS checker these tools were used for testing 52purposes for the "softcopy and hardcopy consistency" part of the IHE 53(Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise), an initiative of RSNA and HIMSS. 54 55For the RSNA 2000 and the ECR 2001, DICOM's new security extensions on secure 56transport connections (TLS - Transport Layer Security) and Digital Signatures 57were added together with a library for DICOM Structured Reporting. Furthermore, 58support for color images has been moved to the public part of the toolkit 59(required separate licensing before). 60 61To be continued ... 62 63In addition to the freely available DCMTK software, OFFIS has also developed 64other DICOM software which must be licensed separately. These separate packages 65build on the facilities provided by DCMTK. -- See: http://dicom.offis.de/ 66