A debate is currently raging in the medical imaging and DICOM connectivity worlds. This debate has been brought about by the recent interest in Vendor Neutral Archive products. The debate is over the need for what is referred to as “tag morphing” functionality when specifying an image archive. “Tag morphing” is the ability to retrieve an image or study from the archive in a fashion such that one or more of the DICOM elements (metadata fields) are created, deleted or manipulated to provide new value(s) for the DICOM element(s) so as to make the retrieving DICOM equipment function properly.

The History of “Tag Morphing”
The concept of “tag morphing” is more than 25 years old. It predates the existence of the DICOM standard. In the early days of digital medical imaging, it was not uncommon to want to acquire image data from modalities of different manufacturers and provide some useful processing capability for that data. Common early external applications included multi-planar reconstruction, radiation therapy planning, dental implant planning, etc.

In each application case, it was required that the image and demographic data be acquired in the modality’s native image format and converted to some “common format” for input to the processing application. Each vendor of add-on-equipment had their own “common format” for use by their application.