DICOM

DICOM Discussions

This page is a collection of thoughts and utilities for DICOM images, networking and processing.

Please keep rants about DICOM to a minimum...

DICOM conversion

Slicer3D can open most DICOM images, and is able to save data to simpler formats (like NRRD). DICOM is a complicated format and it has been interpreted differently by different manufacturers. While DICOM images are typically uncompressed, it also supports arcane compression formats that may not be supported by all tools. Further, it is an evolving format with modern enhanced DICOM files being different from classic DICOM slices. Therefore, some tools may only be able to read a subset of DICOM images. The dcm2niix home page lists numerous DICOM conversion tools in the "Alternatives" section.

Test PACS System

DCMTK provides a utility called dcmqrdb (formerly imagectn). It is fairly straightforward to configure.

Command line

dcmqrscp --config config.txt

Configuration file (config.txt), see dcmqrcnf.txt for more details. Edit the HostTable and the AETable. Connections to "practical" in the example below will be placed in the directory /path/to/archive/Archive. "aware" is the only AE that is allowed to put data in this PACS system.

  
  # Global section
  NetworkType	=	"tcp"
  NetworkTCPPort	=	4006
  MaxPDUSize	=	8192
  MaxAssociations	=	20
  Display		=	"yes"
  
  # Allowed hosts
  # Make sure there are no spaces between the ()'s!!!!
  HostTable BEGIN
  aware = (aware,aware,4006)
  HostTable END
  
  # Vender table ( Ignored )
  VendorTable BEGIN
  VendorTable END
  
  # Application Entry Table
  # ApplicationTitle StorageArea Access Quota Peers
  AETable BEGIN
  practical /path/to/archive/Archive RW (500,1G) ANY
  AETable END
  
  

Dan Blezek's Fetch DICOM Program

Provides GUI for Query/Retrieve and dicom directory sorting and simple file viewing. Version 3.0 of FetchDICOM
Linux version of FetchDICOM -- requires dcmtk to be installed.

Version 2.1 of FetchDICOM
Source for Version 2.x of FetchDICOM

(This version is for Windows, but the code could easily be made for linux, mac etc if needed).