The international angiographic compression study

2000 by the America DICOM cardiac standard became universally accepted throughout the world as the only method appropriate for exchange of digital angiographic images. More recently, the DICOM Standards Committee has adopted a high-resolution standard, defined as 1024 1024 pixel images with up to 12 bits (4096 levels) of gray scale per pixel. The large quantities of digital data required to represent a cardiac angiographic study present a major challenge. In the standard DICOM file format, each cine frame contains 256 kilobytes of data. At a 30 frame per second (fps) acquisition rate, each second of cine requires 7·5 megabytes (MB). For 1024 1024 10 bit images, each second of imaging can require more than 35 MB. A typical diagnostic study 60 s in length and acquired at the lower resolution of 512 512 8 generates approximately 450 MB of digital data. The large size of these digital data files poses a number of operational challenges: