A major milestone in Digital NDT was reached this February— the American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM) E07.11 subcommittee published the new ASTM standard E3147-18 on DICONDE Interoperability. This new standard should help further establish DICONDE in Digital NDT environments and increase the benefits of its use.
Established in 1993, DICONDE (Digital Imaging and Communication for Non-Destructive Evaluation) is an imaging and archiving technology standard that defines all image attributes and elements in a universal format. DICONDE was based on DICOM (Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine), a proven imaging and archiving standard in the medical industry. In 2004, the ASTM E07.11 subcommittee made DICONDE the standard (E2339-11) for NDT (Non-Destructive Testing) with the goal of standardizing an open format for the effective interpretation and preservation of results. Since then, the industry and early adopters have been looking at and have found many other ways they could benefit from this digital imaging format, including enhanced detail from the dynamic brightness and contrast in radiographs; more resilient search, by use of indexed archiving systems; and cross-vendor compatibility. However, initial compatibility between systems was very poor and DICONDE based systems were not able to properly share data. To ensure the various systems that need this data can effectively use it, NDT system purchasers and providers needed a standardized test that could validate that their solutions were interoperable with the systems from other vendors. To facilitate that verification and validation, ASTM published the ASTM standard E3147-18 on DICONDE Interoperability.