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Medical images have become an increasingly common part of medical examinations and diagnoses. It should then come as no surprise that medical images are playing a more important role in legal trials involving personal injuries, medical malpractice and sometimes criminal law.
Ask any experienced personal injury attorney about whether using medical images enhances his or her ability to illustrate a complex story to the jury and you will get a resounding agreement. But if you ask them how difficult it is to make that happen, you will find that most pause, unsure of how to proceed.
In personal injury and medical malpractice litigation, a picture tells a thousand words but a DICOM image can include data from thousands of pictures. Whether going to trial or generating evidence to support a fast settlement, it can be important for attorneys to have a strong grasp on the underlying medical injury. Whether it’s a judge or jury, providing a clear picture of the injury can make or break your case.
Most lawyers are not medical doctors and often require consultation with a medical expert. The attorneys we work with stress the importance of having experts involved early to help them understand nuances associated with the injury in question and the determination of its cause.
Most experts expect to see the original DICOM imaging, understanding that this is the highest quality and most authentic information they could have to form their opinion. If you’re wondering why you shouldn’t just use a much simpler photograph or JPG image, check out the blog, “The Visual Verdict: DICOM vs. JPG Images in Legal Proceedings.”
Due to the size of these DICOM images, sharing them with experts is slow, error-prone, and expensive.
When an attorney is deciding between easy-to-handle JPG images or larger and bulkier DICOM files to illustrate their clients’ medical issues, which is better? Should you take the easy way out?
What you may not know is that the file format for these images can significantly differ, impacting their integrity and relevancy to your case. If winning your case is important to you or your client, you probably shouldn't take the easy way out.
Litigators involved in medical malpractice, personal injury, workers compensation, elder care law and other related medical fields, are realizing that medical images hold a trove of information that if used correctly, can make all the difference in their case. Often lawyers take the easier path by using "pictures" of medical images – jpg files – rather than the DICOM images themselves. This may be sufficient for a simple case. But a more complex case requires the richer, more complex and more difficult to view, store and share DICOM formatted file.
