6(2) 2020: The Politics of Metadata

Browsing 6(2) 2020: The Politics of Metadata by Subject "data model"

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  • Article
    Designing Digital Diagnostics: (Meta)data in Clinical Radiology
    Friedrich, Kathrin (2020) , S. 115-132
    Since the 1990s Western clinical radiology has been confronted with a fundamental media-induced change – the so-called analogue-dig- ital migration. Film-based diagnostics and archiving of radiological images are transformed into digital interfaces and infrastructures. Networked software applications, namely picture archiving and com- munication systems (PACS), provide a new basis for processing and displaying image data. The design and implementation of PACS and their (user) interfaces challenged, amongst others, the search for data standards for digital diagnostics. The data format DICOM (Digital Imaging and Communication) was developed to provide the techno- logical basis for encoding image data. Simultaneously, DICOM deter- mines how patients’ bodies are rendered machine-readable and how radiologists are able to gain software-based insights. A main func- tion of DICOM metadata is encoding and continuously actualising patient identification for technological and human actors. A misiden- tification of image data and specific patient could lead to fatal errors in the furthe+r treatment process. Accordingly, metadata themselves meander between being invisible to the human user and being essen- tial and hence necessarily visible information for diagnostics. Shift- ing between normativity and fluidity, DICOM metadata enables new practices of radiological diagnostics, which literally bear vital conse- quences for patients and, on another level, for the profession of radiol- ogy. The paper analyses inherent politics and tensions of metadata from a media theoretical point of view by employing the case of the DICOM standard. Based on subject-specific discourses, data models as well as an in-depth examination of exemplary DICOM metadata it shows how (meta)data politics redefine diagnostic infrastructures and routines as well as gain impact on epistemic and aesthetic prac- tices at the turn of the analogue-digital migration.