A few days ago, the 2016a edition of the DICOM standard has been made available on the NEMA server. Compared to the previous edition from July last year, 5 supplements and 63 correction items (CPs) have been incorporated. The standard text now consists of 5,556 pages (PDF version).
The supplements and a selection of the correction items are:
- Supplement 156: Planar MPR Volumetric Presentation State
- Supplement 174: RESTful Rendering
- Supplement 181: Tractography Results Storage SOP Class
- Supplement 184: Brachytherapy Delivery Instruction
- Supplement 187: Preclinical Small Animal Imaging Acquisition Context
- CP 1066: Encoding of Attributes with value length > 64kB with Explicit VR
- CP 1477: Clarify 8 bit in Extended JPEG Transfer Syntax
- CP 1501: Add floating point pixel data to list of bulk data attributes
The complete list of correction items incorporated and an overview of the changes to the existing 20 (18) parts of the DICOM standard can be found in the official release notes. Details on the changes from the previous edition are shown highlighted in the files with the word “changes” in the filename.
We have taken the opportunity to update the current development version of the DCMTK again regarding the data dictionary, i.e. we have generated the “dicom.dic” file from the machine-readable DocBook version of part 6 and 7 of the DICOM standard. This updated dictionary also includes a number of new and modified DICONDE tags. In addition, we have updated the code definitions of the supported coding schemes (e.g. DCM, NCIt and UMLS) based on a machine-readable version of part 16 (DCMR, DICOM Content Mapping Resource). The list of SOP Class and Transfer Syntax UIDs as well as the Directory Record Types and Storage Media Application Profiles have already been updated with the recently published DCMTK snapshot.