The quest for standards in medical imaging

This article focuses on standards supporting interoperability and system integration in the medical imaging domain. We introduce the basic concepts and actors and we review the most salient achievements in this domain, especially with the DICOM standard, and the definition of IHE integration profiles. We analyze and discuss what was successful, and what could still be more widely adopted by industry. We then sketch out a perspective of what should be done next, based on our vision of new requirements for the next decade. In particular, we discuss the challenges of a more explicit sharing of image and image processing semantics, and we discuss the help that semantic web technologies (and especially ontologies) may bring to achieving this goal.