Approach to DICOM image display handling the full flexibility of the standard's specification

Joerg Riesmeier; Marco Eichelberg; Peter F. Jensch

doi:10.1117/12.349448

26 May 1999 Approach to DICOM image display handling the full flexibility of the standard's specification

Joerg Riesmeier, Marco Eichelberg, Peter F. Jensch

Author Affiliations +

Proceedings Volume 3658, Medical Imaging 1999: Image Display; (1999) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.349448
Event: Medical Imaging '99, 1999, San Diego, CA, United States

Abstract

DICOM is widely accepted today as the standard protocol for medical image interchange. DICOM offers very flexible data structures allowing to easily encode a wide variety of modality specific image formats. This flexibility, however, causes problems in image display: most DICOM viewers are limited to the 'most usual' subset of the standard's specification which makes up the vast majority of images but covers only a very small part of DICOM's capabilities. Our approach was to design a toolkit which attempts to overcome the common restrictions of existing DICOM implementations. Apart from completeness, i.e. the support for all image formats defined in DICOM, the main objectives were: efficiency, extensibility and portability. The resulting toolkit is built on a well-designed C++ class hierarchy which makes extensive use of template classes and inline methods for best performance. Two applications based on this toolkit have been developed: a conversion and manipulation tool and a small DICOM viewer. In addition to the freely available DICOM test images distributed by vendors of medical equipment we used artificially created images covering all aspects and options of the DICOM image models for testing. Our implementation demonstrates that it is both possible and practicable to support the entire DICOM image format without sacrificing efficiency. Nevertheless the question remains whether DICOM's present complexity is really necessary. An introduction of useful restrictions would make it much easier for DICOM implementers to support the standard's image format in its entirety and thus increase the software's robustness.

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Joerg Riesmeier, Marco Eichelberg, and Peter F. Jensch "Approach to DICOM image display handling the full flexibility of the standard's specification", Proc. SPIE 3658, Medical Imaging 1999: Image Display, (26 May 1999); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.349448

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