Glossary: Medical Imaging & Medical IT Terms

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Confused by all of the  Medical Imaging & Medical IT acronyms, terms and buzzwords? Here's a handy glossary to help translate!

Term	Description
ADT	HL7 Admit, Discharge, and Transfer message
AES	Advanced Encryption Standard is a block cipher adopted as an encryption standard by the U.S. government and announced by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in 2001.
AN/API	DeJarnette’s DICOM toolkit. The xDLTM application is built using AN/API
API	Application Programming Interface – a source code interface used to support requests to be made by another program or application.
CILM	Clinical Information Lifecycle Management – a set of strategies for administering storage systems.
COM	Component Object Model – a platform introduced by Microsoft to enable inter-process communication and object creation in any programming language that supports the platform.
DICOM	Digital Imaging and COmmunications in Medicine - the DICOM Standard facilitates interoperability of medical imaging equipment.
DICOM Part 10	Part 10 of the DICOM Standard specifies Media Storage and a File Format for Media Interchange.
GUI	Graphical User Interface
HIPAA	Hospital Insurance Portability and Accountability Act – enacted by US Congress in 1996 that addresses the security and privacy of health data.
HL7	Health Level 7 - the HL7 standard facilitates the exchange, management, and integration of electronic healthcare information
HTTP	Hyper-Text Transfer Protocol – a method for transferring or conveying information on the Internet.
HTTPS	HTTP over an encrypted Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) or Transport Layer Security (TLS) transport mechanism that ensures reasonable protection from eavesdroppers and attacks.
IHE	Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise – IHE promotes the coordinated use of standards such as DICOM and HL7 to address specific clinical needs in support of optimal patient care.
IIS	Internet Information Services – a powerful web server from Microsoft that is included with the Windows Server 2003 OS.
ILM	Information Lifecycle Management – a set of strategies for administering storage systems.
LAN	Local Area Network – a computer network covering a local area such as an office or a group of buildings.
MD5	Message-Digest Algorithm 5 – a widely used cryptographic hash function
ORM	HL7 General Order message
ORU	HL7 Unsolicited Observation message
PACS	Picture Archiving and Communication System – a system for the storage, management and dissemination of digital medical images.
PNA	PACS Neutral Archive – see VNA (Vendor Neutral Archive)

RIS	Radiology Information System – a radiology scheduling, patient registration, procedure ordering, results reporting, and billing system.
SCP	Service Class Provider – a provider of a Service (in DICOM lexicon)
SCU	Service Class User – a user of a Service (in DICOM lexicon)
SOP	Service-Object Pair - an SOP class is the union of a Service and an information object. (in DICOM lexicon)
SQL	Structured Query Language – a popular computer language for creating, retrieving, updating and deleting data from relational databases.
TAR	Tape Archive file format, based on the original Unix archive command, used to collate collections of files into one larger file for archiving.
TCP/IP	Transfer Control Protocol/Internet Protocol – a set of communication protocols used by the Internet and most commercial networks.
URL	Uniform Resource Locator – a location or address on the Internet.
VNA	Vendor Neutral Archive – medical image archive software that is agnostic to the PACS manufacturer and storage hardware vendor. See the White Paper “What is a Vendor Neutral Archive?”
xDLTM	Cross-enterprise (x) Document Library – DeJarnette Research Systems VNA which scales to archive projects of all sizes, from a simple modality archive to a regional or national image archive.
XDS-I	Cross-enterprise (X) Document Sharing for Imaging – IHE profile for sharing of documents and images across disparate healthcare enterprises.