why DICOM images are used in biomedical imaging instead of .jpg or .tiff ?

Actually, i am working on biomedical image processing but now i'm showing output as .jpg

Answer 1

[Walter Roberson]

jpeg are not good for scientific study as jpeg is a lossy image compression. In particular, jpeg files blur sharp lines.

TIFF is not a bad image format, but it was originally a binary file standard for scanned files and lacked many many of the features it has now. The first published specification (still binary I gather) was in 1986.

Meanwhile staring in 1983 work had begun on what was to become DICOM standard, with the first published version in 1985 with a specific focus on medical imaging (e.g., CT and MRI). DICOM "is a standard for handling, storing, printing, and transmitting information in medical imaging". DICOM is a complete set of specifications for handling medical images with multiple modalities, multiple trials, multiple patients, associated databases, and so on. There is a lot more to DICOM than just storing "images". For example a DICOM file has to store instrument settings, patient identifier, multiple slices, conversion factors for determining physical X/Y/Z coordinates, and so on. Just about anything you might want to do with digital medical images falls under DICOM, not just producing pictures.

You can do a lot of useful image work with TIFF files. If you are using scientific medical imaging instruments you are probably going to be dealing with DICOM.

But whatever you do, avoid using JPEG for serious science work.

[Durgesh Naik]

is there any type of DICOM licensing for commercial use?

[Walter Roberson]

Durgesh, I am not sure what you are asking about?

DICOM is a standard, not a particular product. If I read the information at http://dicom.nema.org/ correctly, NEMA holds copyright to the standard, and has registered the trademark to prevent anyone else registering the trademark and using it against other people, but NEMA expects each company to build their own product and do their own testing. There appears to be no charge for using the standard.

It would, however, be expensive and time consuming to develop your own DICOM compliant product, so most people would license someone else's DICOM library or find some kind of open source DICOM library.