MODALIZER+ Video tutorials on YouTube

Here's a nice thing about blogging, it keeps a log, Ha?! And like a log, it's a peace of history and as it's been running since 2008 I find it interesting (well, it's my blog). I'm coming to the point, and the point is that MODALIZER+, a software that my team and I develop for quite a while now is kind of documented here with all its evolvement, since it started as a bunch of tests of our SDK up to its current release which I'm quite happy with. And now as there are more and more users of MODALIZER+, we started making this video tutorials series on YouTube. We have two videos now and we're working on more to add to the channel. Check them out. The first two ore more focused on the software itself and the next ones are going also to focus on DICOM in general. Stay tuned and tell me what you think in the comments.

Video to DICOM (and back)

This is a story of a lost battle. For many years I refused to add MPEG to DICOM functionality in my DICOM SDK. The explanation I gave to myself and to my customers was that storing video in PACS is a bad idea because video streams are usually very big and nobody ever watches them. From an engineering point of view, the size of the video is not so much a matter of disk space but rather a network headache. The way that the DICOM network protocol works, with all the different levels of timeouts and with no failover mechanisms for PDU’s may cause such huge objects to fail over and over when stored and restored. For the clinical point of view, I consulted with Radiologists friends from whom I learned that the driving force behind keeping most of this stuff is not clinical but rather medico legal. These excuses held for some time but eventually, because I’m an engineer but also a businessman, I changed my mind. After all, the customer is always right, and when more and more customers asked to convert video to DICOM, I realized that winning this battle means loosing customers and that’s not something a businessman should do.

Videos were added to DICOM through the mechanism of Transfer Syntax. All together there are currently four (4) video transfer syntaxes for different types of MPEG’s. Here's the list of these transfer syntaxes:

• MPEG2 Main Profile @ Main Level : "1.2.840.10008.1.2.4.100"
• MPEG2 Main Profile @ High Level : "1.2.840.10008.1.2.4.101"
• MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 High Profile / Level 4.1 : "1.2.840.10008.1.2.4.102"
• MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 BD-compatible High Profile / Level 4.1 : "1.2.840.10008.1.2.4.103"

If I have to guess, there will probably be more added in the future as new formats of video gain take over. The embedded document option that was taken for PDF would probably be my choice but I admit that I didn’t investigate the reasons that led to the way the standard went and there may have