RFC 3240 (rfc3240) - Page 2 of 6

Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) - Application/dicom MIME Sub-type Registration

RFC 3240      Application/dicom MIME Sub-type Registration February 2002


   Required parameters:

      "id" is constructed from a DICOM File ID (see DICOM PS3.11).  The
      total length is limited to 71 characters.  Each component is
      limited to 8 characters.  The delimiter is a forward slash "/".
      There is never a leading delimiter (i.e., this is not a
      traditional path from a root directory).

      If a DICOMDIR (which provides an index of files) is included, then
      it will refer to other DICOM files in the file set by use of this
      File ID.  The File ID is not encoded within each DICOM file.  If a
      DICOMDIR is not present, then the "id" parameter may be absent.
      Note that the DICOMDIR will also have a Media Type of
      application/dicom and is distinguished from other files by its ID
      of "DICOMDIR".

      For example:
       "ROOTDIR/SUBDIR1/MRSCAN/A789FD07/19991024/ST00234/S00003/I00023"

      Each component shall be character strings made of characters from
      a subset of the G0 repertoire of ISO 8859.  This subset consists
      of uppercase alphabetic characters, numeric characters and
      underscore.  The following characters are permissable:

      A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, Q, R, S, T, U, V,
      W, X, Y, Z (uppercase)
      1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 0 and _ (underscore)

   Optional parameters:

      none

   Encoding considerations:

      The DICOM information is binary, therefore the encoding used shall
      support lossless transfer of binary information.  Typically, the
      Content-Transfer-Encoding would be set to "Base64".

      Multiple DICOM parts should be included as a Multipart/related
      entity [2387].  Receiving agents shall also support multiple parts
      as a Multipart/mixed entity.  When multiple DICOM parts are
      included, one of the parts may be a DICOMDIR, in which case, all
      the files referred to by the DICOMDIR shall also be present.  The
      DICOMDIR is not required to be the first Application/dicom part
      encoded in the message, in which case the optional "start"
      parameter should refer to the content-id of the part containing
      the DICOMDIR.




Clunie, et al.               Informational