Synchronization and Alignment of Follow-up Examinations: a Practical and Educational Approach Using the DICOM Reference Coordinate System

This work presents an approach for synchronization and alignment of Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) series from different studies that allows, e.g., easier reading of follow-up examinations. The proposed concept developed within the DICOM’s patient-based reference coordinate system allows to synchronize all image data of two different studies/examinations based on a single registration. The most suitable DICOM series for registration could be set as default per protocol. Necessary basics regarding the DICOM standard and the used mathematical transformations are presented in an educative way to allow straightforward implementation in Picture Archiving And Communications Systems (PACS) and other DICOM tools. The proposed method for alignment of DICOM images is potentially also useful for various scientific tasks and machine-learning applications.