# Medical APIs **URL:** \ **Category:** Ruby\ **Created:** [December 27, 2005, 10:25pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/medical-apis/77961 "2005-12-27T22:25:05Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 4\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![tomjerry](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/t/7bcc69/32.png) [@tomjerry](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/tomjerry)\ **Post date:** [December 27, 2005, 10:25pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/medical-apis/77961/1 "2005-12-27T22:25:05Z")
Hi All: Are there any ruby libraries or hooks into the medial apis out there? IHE > **[Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE) - IHE International](https://www.ihe.net/)** > > IHE is an initiative by healthcare professionals and industry to improve the way computer systems in healthcare share information. IHE promotes the coordinated use of established standards such as DICOM and HL7 to address specific clinical needs in... [http://www.himss.org/ASP/topics\_IHE.asp](http://www.himss.org/ASP/topics_IHE.asp) DICOM [http://medical.nema.org/](http://medical.nema.org/) [http://medical.nema.org/dicom/2004.html](http://medical.nema.org/dicom/2004.html) [http://www.nema.org/prod/med/](http://www.nema.org/prod/med/) HL7 (version 3 or version 2) [http://www.hl7.org/](http://www.hl7.org/) Thanks, – Tom. – “Nothing will ever be attempted, if all possible objections must first be overcome.” - Samuel Johnson “Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.” - Seneca ---
**Author:** ![tomjerry](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/t/7bcc69/32.png) [@tomjerry](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/tomjerry)\ **Post date:** [December 31, 2005, 3:19pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/medical-apis/77961/2 "2005-12-31T15:19:13Z")
What are the medical apis for. I might be interested. ---
**Author:** ![tomjerry](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/t/7bcc69/32.png) [@tomjerry](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/tomjerry)\ **Post date:** [January 1, 2006, 12:54am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/medical-apis/77961/3 "2006-01-01T00:54:26Z")
DICOM is the Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine. I basically defines services and image data interchange between services in a hospital environment. For example, you have a patient comes into a cath lab for a cath proceedure. That loop of images needs to be stored some where and be capable of referrencing via other nodes in the hospital. Like an image review station that the physician uses to diagnose. The rules and conventions to do this are defined by the DICOM standard. “The DICOM Information Model defines the structure and organization of the information related to communication of medical images.” In the above example, the loop of images is defined as a DICOM IOD (Image Object Definition) and provides a standard set of attributes (view) of the information to be interchanged to Application Entities (AE). Each AE plays a role in the DIMSE (DICOM Message Service Element) communication exchange. Either as a SCU (Service Class User) or as a SCP (Service Class Provider). Service Class is just a collection of SOP (Service Object Pair) Classes. And a SOP Class is defined as the union of the DIMSE and one IOP. For the above review station to get the loop of images from another AE, it needed to establish a DICOM Association with that AE, perform a C-FIND to located the image loop, and then do a C-MOVE to get the image. HL7 is defined as Healthcare Level 7. It is used in hospitals for the exchange of related patient information between hospital nodes. For example, patient visit scheduling, exams, prescriptions, et al. The version 2 of HL7 was a pipe (|) deliminated message structure and is still prevalent at most hospitals. Version 3 of HL7 went towards standardizing on XML for it’s information interchange. It is better to work with version 3 instead of version 2 because of the flexibility that version 2 gave implementors in ignoring aspects of the “standard”. Version 3 goes after eliminating this flexibility to provide less need for customization with each vendor your application communicates with. IHE (Integrated Healthcare Enterprise), I am less familiar with; but from my reading it is targeted more at the vertical healthcare markets. Cardiology, Radiology, etc. Thus, it uses DICOM and HL7 in it’s attempt to bring together an integrated healthcare record for the patient. I know that this was long winded but I hope it helps. Thanks, – Tom. On 12/31/05, Ammon C. [removed\_email\_address@domain.invalid](mailto:removed_email_address@domain.invalid) wrote: > > [http://www.himss.org/ASP/topics\_IHE.asp](http://www.himss.org/ASP/topics_IHE.asp) > > – Tom. – “Nothing will ever be attempted, if all possible objections must first be overcome.” - Samuel Johnson “Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity.” - Seneca ---
**Author:** ![tomjerry](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/t/7bcc69/32.png) [@tomjerry](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/tomjerry)\ **Post date:** [January 2, 2006, 5:59pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/medical-apis/77961/4 "2006-01-02T17:59:00Z")
Tom J. schrieb: > Are there any ruby libraries or hooks into the medial apis out there? Hi Tom, I’m studying Medical Information Science and I’m really interested in such libraries too. If I had some more sparetime, I’ll try to write one of such as a exercice (not the full dicom spec of course _g_). If you found some links, please let me know. g,