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For many doctors, specialists, hospitals, health care practices and medical facilities, the cloud holds a lot of promise for storing and  accessing medical imaging studies by physicians and patients alike. Luckily, virtual cloud storage can typically find an application for nearly every type of medical imaging modality, from CT scanners to MRI machines and everything in between. 

Many Purview Image users have questions about DICOM images, including:  

• Can DICOM files be compressed?
• Are DICOM files large?
• Why are DICOM files so large?
• Can you email a DICOM file?
• Why is the DICOM format most suitable for medical images?
• How do I convert a DICOM to a JPEG?
• What is image compression in radiology?

Today, this blog post will focus on whether DICOM medical images can be compressed, when it's appropriate to compress them, and how you can get started.  

Suppose a specialist physician in California is corresponding with a patient in Texas who has an urgent illness. The physician wants to schedule an emergency appointment, but needs to review the patient's medical imaging studies to properly confirm and address the diagnosis. The patient could send a CD hard copy of their studies through the mail, but this is costly and wastes valuable time. The CD could also get lost in transit or arrive to the physician broken or unreadable. 

If you work in health care, you need to protect the data in your picture archiving and communication system. It's critical to have good data backups because losing protected health information (PHI), including images, could be detrimental to your practice or hospital.