C Waveforms (Informative)

Waveform acquisition is part of both the medical imaging environment and the general clinical environment. Because of its broad use, there has been significant previous and complementary work in waveform standardization of which the following are particularly important:

For DICOM, the domain of waveform standardization is waveform acquisition within the imaging context. It is specifically meant to address waveform acquisitions that will be analyzed with other data that is transferred and managed using the DICOM protocol. It allows the addition of waveform data to that context with minimal incremental cost. Further, it leverages the DICOM persistent object capability for maintaining referential relationships to other data collected in a multi-modality environment, including references necessary for multi-modality synchronization.

Waveform interchange in other clinical contexts may use different protocols more appropriate to those domains. In particular, HL7 may be used for transfer of waveform observations to general clinical information systems, and MIB may be used for real-time physiological monitoring and therapy.

The waveform information object definition in DICOM has been specifically harmonized at the semantic level with the HL7 waveform message format. The use of a common object model allows straightforward transcoding and interoperation between systems that use DICOM for waveform interchange and those that use HL7, and may be viewed as an example of common semantics implemented in the differing syntaxes of two messaging systems.