A DICOM-based standard for quantitative physical rehabilitation

Abstract

Physical rehabilitation (PR) is a critical medical discipline traditionally reliant on qualitative data for procedure evaluation. Recent scientific and technological advances have provided innovative instruments and methods for measuring and evaluating PR objectively through Quantitative PR (QPR). However, the lack of a standard data format creates several challenges. These include limited interoperability between devices, difficulties in maintaining patient histories, inability to perform temporal evaluations or inter-patient comparisons, barriers to data sharing, challenges in creating common evaluation scales for therapists, and limitations in statistical analysis. This article proposes a DICOM Information Object Definition (IOD) for QPR, referred to as PR-IOD, and describes its architecture. DICOM is an established standard initially created for medical imaging, but it has recently been extended to other areas of medicine. Its primary goals are to facilitate data sharing among various devices, manage associated processes, and ensure interoperability among systems and specialists by generating structured data. The implemented PR-IOD architecture has been applied to manage data by a multiple-source hand-tracking device, the Virtual Glove (VG), used for hand rehabilitation. The corresponding DICOM files have been generated, loaded, and visualized alongside a viewer dashboard specifically tailored for PR-IOD. The source code is available at [1].