Figure 2. An illustration of the relationships among the DICOM objects discussed in this manuscript.

DICOM PET/CT is the original dataset obtained by the imaging equipment and is modified only by the de-identification procedure. DICOM RWVM, SEG, and measurement SR are derived objects. DICOM SR with the clinical information encodes the information about the patient originally stored in the relational database. Solid lines denote explicit reference of the object instances by the derived objects (referenced instance is pointed to by the arrow). Dashed bidirectional arrows denote commonality of identifiers (i.e., common composite context, e.g., at the Patient and Study level).