The following links provide a starting place for learning about the DICOM standard and acquiring free tutorials, libraries, and applications. This is not a comprehensive list of DICOM resources since others (see Metaresources below) have fulfilled that task.

Official DICOM Resources

• DICOM 3.1 - 2003: The latest document describing the standard, with each chapter available in PDF format.
  
  
• DICOM homepage: Sponsored by NEMA. Here you can find all of the official standards documents and supplements.

Metaresources and Link Indices

The following pages provide lists of links to all manner of DICOM resources, including free software and tutorials.

• Chris Rorden’s DICOM resources: Introduction to DICOM and superb list of resources.
  
  
• Bernd Binder’s DICOM resources: Many DICOM and other medical links.

Tutorials

• DICOM Cook Book: Tutorial from Philips Medical Systems available in PDF format. This is a clear, technical introduction.
  
  
• What Mom Forgot to Tell You about DICOM: A buyer’s guide for DICOM connectivity and the problems encountered in establishing DICOM connectivity.Useful after learning the basics.

Software

The software listed below is mostly free and open-source.

• UCMDC99: Collection of libraries and applications originally written by Mark Oskin (UC Davis), modified by Gunter Zeilinger (Karl-Franzens-Universitaet) and now maintained by Trevor Morgan (Sunnybrook).
  
  
• DCMTK Toolkit: Collection of libraries and applications from OFFIS (Oldenburg, Germany).
  
  
• Mallinckrodt CTN software: DICOM software produced by the Mallinckrodt Institute of
  
  
• Radiology (MIR) for the RSNA: The project is described at the MIR site and the RSNA site.
  
  
• Dicom3tools: David A. Clunie’s tools for converting proprietary formats to DICOM.
  
  
• ezDICOM: This software is designed to display most medical images. The tools can also be used to convert DICOM to JPEG, PNG and BMP formats. Also it can be used for your own programs.

Stripping Confidential DICOM Tags ("Anonymizing")

The following are free programs that have a feature to strip confidential information from DICOM files. The affected tags are those that refer to the patient directly (name, birth date, ID) and indirectly (institution, performing physician and referring physician names).

• FP Image: This Windows viewer program will replace confidential fields by N/A. It does not process a batch of files.
  
  
• Sante Dicom Viewer: This Windows viewer program will replace confidential fields with a blank. The user can select multiple files in a directory for batch processing.

Newsgroups

• Comp.protocol.dicom: Hosted at Google.