DICOM E-mail: Germany's minimum standard for teleradiology

Abstract Due to the lack of a standard for teleradiology, the IT Working Group (Arbeitsgemeinschaft fur Informationstechnik, @GIT) of the German Radiological Society (Deutsche Rontgengesellschaft, DRG) has set up an initiative for standardizing telemedicine. E-mail has been selected as the ideal basis for ad hoc connections in teleradiology since it is both easy to implement and use. The DICOM standard offers the option of appending DICOM data types as MIME attachments to any e-mail, thus enabling the transmission of the original DICOM data. Nevertheless, there are additional requirements (e.g., data privacy) that must be obeyed and implemented. The first recommendation was introduced at th…