IHE (Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise) is a project supported by numerous vendors of medical products.

The IHE initiative promotes the aim of providing standardized interfaces for data exchange in health care and ensuring their functionality for all vendors. This is done based on the HL7 and DICOM interfaces which are dominant in the field of health care.

Medical systems, which support the IHE Standard, can communicate with each other and can therefore be easily combined to work together. Supporting the IHE Standards enables more effective use of information systems in the field of medicine. The IHE Standard creates planning and investment security for a hospital's IT strategy.

While the scope of IHE's work is quite broad (it includes imaging as well as information systems), the portion that applies to imagers is rather small. Specifically, it requires that imagers support the existing DICOM Print protocol, including the optional (by the DICOM standard) Presentation LUT SOP Class. Horizon already supports all of the mandatory portions of DICOM Print and will support Presentation LUT's (also know as P-LUT's) starting with v1.9.0 software.

In basic terms, Presentation LUT's allow a print client to specify how to render images on hardcopy so that they mimic what is seen on a softcopy viewer (i.e. a computer monitor). This is part of what IHE calls the "Consistent Presentation of Images" (CPI) profile. It is based on the "Grayscale Standard Display Function" (GSDF), which is very similar to Horizon's existing "Visual" LUT, but with a few extra parameters. These extra parameters allow the LUT to take into account the viewing conditions, which include the luminance of the light box and the ambient light levels.

• Horizon IHE Conformance Statement
• Infinity IHE Conformance Statement
• Integrity IHE Conformance Statement
• Virtua IHE Conformance Statement

More information can be obtained via the IHE website www.ihe.net