A DICOM-based streaming service for the Digital Operating Room Release 0.00 Adrian Vázquez, Rafael Mayoral and Oliver Burgert July 10, 2009 ICCAS, Universität Leipzig, Semmelweisstraße 14, D-04103 Leipzig Abstract In the Digital Operating Room there is a need to support data streaming to create advanced integrated surgical assist systems. In this paper we propose a DICOM-based streaming mechanism which leverages the interoperability definitions offered by DICOM to offer a common interface to manage all kinds of streaming data sources, while allowing data and application-specific protocols and infrastructure for the actual data access. We have implemented the proposed solution within the ASTMA project and have shown that thanks to the flexibility in choosing an appropriate streaming protocol we can achieve the necessary streaming quality while transmitting the context information required to create valid DICOM instances. This approach ensures an early integration of streaming data with the rest of the imaging information providing for a simpler data workflow. Contents 1 Introduction 1 2 DICOM-based implementation of the general framework 2 3 The ASTMA project implementation 4 4 Conclusions 8 1 Introduction In surgery, the wish to tackle more complex and information-intensive tasks and to optimally use existing resources demands tighter integration of existing and future surgical assist systems [1]. This integration ultimately creates a distributed surgical assist system whose functionalities are obtained by combining the appropriate components. Such integration represents a departure from the still today common situation of isolated monolithic surgical assist systems, exchanging more-or-less independent and self-contained units of information, which are processed once the complete data set has arrived. The new class of assist system, with distributed functionalities and tighter integration, will require increased continuous data transfer and processing among its components. To handle this type of data transmission, the system will have to support streaming of continuous data.