Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM)

13.8 Conclusion 299
C-Stores, and for so much more. All this needs to change to make DICOM
networks really scalable.
Finally, there are also many legal, social, and financial aspects of teleradiology
that we must leave out because they are beyond the scope of this book.
They are very well discussed in teleradiology literature; and they, too, evolve
constantly.
Nevertheless, with little doubt, teleradiology should and will become an integral
part of PACS, finding a more elaborate technical representation in standards
such as DICOM. Learning and standardizing new processes is really the
most efficient way to ensure their correctness. We might repeat ourselves, but
there is no conceptual boundary between conventional local PACS and widearea
PACS, or teleradiology. Hopefully, soon enough, local PACS will be well
forgotten, and digital imaging without distance constraints will become a true
radiology standard.