Translating DICOM to FHIR

Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) is the communication standard for imaging and related metadata in healthcare.

However, DICOM’s complexity can be a barrier, and it may not give you the holistic view of the patient. With Redox, you can translate DICOM operations to FHIR® to interact with medical imaging and metadata in a modern, easier way.

Redox can benefit customers on the receiving side of the DICOM data exchange for these use cases:

• Providers needing to interpret any kind of imaging or related metadata.
• Providers wanting to view a patient’s historical imaging without needing previous provider interpretations.
• Vendors consuming imaging data for AI learning or processing.

The Redox FHIR® ImagingStudy resource translates imaging metadata to FHIR®. Refer to the ImagingStudy schema.

As the intermediary, Redox passes the data without processing the original images to avoid latency. But here’s how the DICOM to FHIR® queries generally go:

1. You send a query to Redox for a patient’s imaging results.
2. Redox queries the provider’s web service to find the original image on the Picture Archiving and Communications System (PACS) server.
3. The PACS server sends a response to Redox with the URL for the storage location of the image.
4. Redox returns to you the endpoint URL for the image (within the FHIR® Endpoint resource, which is referenced in ImagingStudy).
5. You send a query to the endpoint URL to retrieve the original image.

Redox translates standard DICOM operations into a FHIR® bundle. Check out which DICOM operations we support below.