As medical imaging technology progresses, new modalities are added to the Standard. For example, vessel wall detection in intravascular ultrasound is often easier if the images are left in radial form. Unfortunately, most DICOM workstations would not know how to deal with images in such a strange format even though the workstation might recognize that it is an image.

One possible solution is for a workstation to seek out an appropriate Hosted Application for handling Modalities or SOP classes that it does not recognize. This would allow for automatic handling of all image types by a generic imaging platform. Similarly, SOP Classes, even private SOP Classes, could be created that depend on particular Hosted Applications to prepare data for display.