DICOM publication in an XML format

The publication of the DICOM standard in an XML format he idea is that by having the specification in XML developers will be able to access all of the tables, all of the information object definitions, and the vocabulary, and use this in their products.
This would enable thinks like test tools, code generators, documentation generators - there's wide variety of things that they expect to facilitate by creating an XML specification.

FHIR and RESTful DICOM
New users with new use cases want to leverage the technology they have - so if mobile devices support REST, DICOM has to create a RESTful protocol to allow for access to imaging objects by such devices. DICOM tries to ensure that the evolutionary trends still maintain the value of any existing images in the radiology department. As such these new protocols are viewed as layers on top of DICOM. There'll be a mixture of the DICOM native protocol and webservices for some of these new use cases.

Radiation dosage monitoring

DICOM also has relationships with the IEC related to the issue of radiation safety. Regulatory agencies have an interest in collecting information related to radiation/patient safety issues. Jointly with the IEC DICOM has created the information stuctures to capture patient radiation dose information, initially for simple X-Rays, for CT, and currently they're working on collecting radiation data for radiopharmaceuticals. This is tricky, because the radiopharmaceutical dose is not produced by the imaging equipment, but by the radiopharmaceutical agent. The dosage has to be collected in a system that's ancilary to the imaging equipment.