R&D
DICOM harmonization
Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) is a standard for managing medical images and related metadata. It includes a file format definition and a rigorous data dictionary, and is widely accepted in the biomedical community.
At the same time, the biomedical community is using HDF5 increasingly for managing large images. A very valuable project would be to map DICOM to HDF, and create converters for converting between the two formats. This could be expanded to adapt tools that currently work with DICOM to support HDF5, and to adapt certain HDF5 tools to provide meaningful display and operations on DICOM-compliant medical images in HDF5. This would potentially be a fairly large project with high payoff. A group of interested parties has written a paper on this issue, submitted to the Journal of Structural Biology.
"Dougherty, M. T., et al. "Review of current and potential microscopy data formats, submitted to J. of Structural Biology."