Co-founder of Innolitics chiming in here

While this is undoubtedly one take on the subject, allow me to give you another perspective:

One of my friends had an MRI taken for suspected nasopharyngeal cancer. The physician that read the scan did not find cancer. Thankfully, his ENT physician did not believe the diagnosis and took another look at his MRI, which happened to be in DICOM format. He was able to load the images on a DICOM compliant image viewer and saw the tumor right away. My friend underwent surgery and was confirmed to have cancer by microscopy.

I think DICOM saved his life. It allowed his ENT physician to take another look, which would have probably been significantly harder with a proprietary file format.

Yujan Shrestha, MD