A Survey on Secure DICOM Transfer through Network

DICOM, a standard used for secure connection and transfer of digital images, which is the integration of medical images with patient related information. The procedures in hospitals require the radiological images which contains few attributes of the image and the patients whose information belongs to. Report without any images is difficult to understand by common man, hence it requires a combination of both image and report. The main issue during transfer of these images is their security. It must be taken care that transfer of data should be protected from third parties, for this DICOM should provide some mechanism for security. Many methods are available for securing the data, by encrypting and decrypting the data. The developing system is used to transfer DICOM files, and extend the same in the system to meet the requirement of security. There are hospitals which allow systems to connect to hospital infrastructure only via secure way i.e., certificate based authentication. The current system on which it is being used supports only standard DICOM protocols, hence the systems cannot be used in hospitals which mandates certificate based authentication. Therefore, the systems which supports certificate based DICOM connectivity software is being developed and this has become a vast area for research.