Dr. Aris had spent most of his morning navigating the sleek, modern corridors of a high-tech hospital, but his real challenge sat in the basement—the hospital's "Digital Dead Letter Office." A research study from 2012 required him to analyze a series of specialized CT scans stored on old patient CDs. These weren't just standard images; they were DICOM files, the universal language of medical imaging, but they were encoded in a format that the modern web-based hospital system struggled to interpret without losing critical metadata.