MINUTES
DICOM WORKING GROUP TEN
Web Services Study Group
June 28, 2007
Berlin, Germany
WG-10 Members Present:
Represented by:
Agfa HealthCare Imaging
American College of Radiology
ETIAM
GE Healthcare
JAHIS
JIRA
Merge eMed
Philips Medical Systems
Societe Francaise de Radiologie
Siemens Medical Solutions
Toshiba
Geert Claeys
Charles Kahn
Emmanuel Cordonnier
Charles Parisot
Hidenori Shinoda
Koji Imokawa
John Fehrenbach
Cor Loef
Joel Chabriais
Niki Wirsz
Kevin O’Donnell
WG-10 Members Absent:
Voting Representative:
Others Present at WS Meeting
Associated with:
Fred Behlen
Tatsuo Heki
Rob Horn
Andrei Leontiev
Michael Onken
Bas Revet
Jenn-Lung Su
American College of Radiology
FujiFilm
Agfa HealthCare Imaging
Dynamic Imaging
OFFIS e. V.
Philips Medical Systems
MISAT
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Web Services Study Group
of DICOM Working Group Ten
June 28, 2007
Presiding Officer
Cor Loef, Chair
1. Preliminary Events
Chair Cor Loef called the meeting to order at 12:40 p.m.
Participants identified themselves and their employers. (All voting members were present.)
Mr. Loef reminded members that the purpose of the meeting was to look at the potential utilization
of Web Services in DICOM.
2. Discussion
The following notes were prepared by Cor Loef to summarize the discussion that occurred
during this meeting:
Main Advantages of Web Services:
 Association Negotiation in a rapidly changing environment; the SW development time
will improve.
 Tools are already available for Web Services, which results in rapid development of the
application SW.
 Tools are available above the TCP level.
 Education and documentation are widely available.
 Implementation effectiveness extends beyond the narrow field of imaging.
The down-side of Web Services:
 Processing is rather slow (milliseconds).
 XML parsers are slow for high volume data (binary). The solution for large binary data
is MTOM. (However, MTOM is not yet a schema-aware encoding).
Negotiation in the Association:
In Web Services, more is done during implementation, which happens almost at run-time. Web
Services operates on lower levels in the protocol stack. However, WS can map easily to DICOM
services using constructs like UDDI and, maybe, WS-Policy for Meta SOP classes.
Question:
How deep do we go to XML-ize the binary object? Can we avoid the HL7 V3 problem?
Presentation by Emmanuel Cordonnier on WADO with Web Services:
Members suggested that Emmanuel make WS of all normalized Services, but keep the binary
form for the SOP instances. A copy of Mr. Cordonnier’s presentation may be found at:
ftp://medical.nema.org/MEDICAL/Dicom/Minutes/WG-10/Web_Services/2007/2007-06-28/WG10.DICOM-WS.WSDO.20070628.ppt
or
http://medical.nema.org/Dicom/minutes/WG-10/Web_Services/2007/2007-06-28/WG10.DICOM-WS.WSDO.20070628.ppt
Where are benefits expected in the Radiology use cases?
 Aggregated view of imaging content and all other relevant information tuned to my
specific task.
 Orchestration of services in the workflow. Common architecture for accessing
information and workflow. Web viewer is not enough; CCOW does not provide enough
context sharing. BPEL as sequence of actions, available in WF engines.
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Web Services Study Group
of DICOM Working Group Ten
June 28, 2007


Availability of security services
Could fill-in the gap for the link from the Radiology domain objects (images and reports)
to the EMR. What Radiology content do people want to consume? What EMR content
do Radiologists need to have available when interpreting images?
HL7 CDA is working on Web Services.
We should have a proposal on Web Services for DICOM available by RSNA to present to the
DICOM Committee.
3. Action list:
1. Determine the business value of Web Services in the imaging domain.
2. Determine the boundary between binary DICOM and XML in the DICOM stack.
3. Prepare WG-10’s recommendation for presentation to the DICOM Standards Committee
at RSNA.
4. Future Meetings
The group will hold a teleconference at 9 a.m. EDT on Wednesday, July 18th, 2007.
5. Adjournment
The meeting was adjourned at 1:40 p.m. Central European Time.
Submitted by:
Cor Loef, Chair and
Howard E. Clark, Secretary
September 10, 2007
Reviewed by Legal Counsel:
September 10, 2007
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Web Services Study Group
of DICOM Working Group Ten
June 28, 2007