Dicom3tools Software

Getting it ...

• fetch the workinprogress dicom3tools package (by http) - this is almost certainly what you want (not the old stuff)
  
• fetch selected Cygwin binaries of the validation and dump tools from the current workinprogress dicom3tools package (by http) - see Frequent Answers below
  
• fetch the old unsupported dicom3tools package (by http)
  
• fetch a version of imake to use if you don't have it (by http)
  

What is it ...

Unix (and Cygwin) utilities for creating, modifying, dumping and validating offline files of DICOM attributes, and conversion of proprietary image formats to DICOM. Can handle older ACR/NEMA format data, and some proprietary versions of that such as SPI.

Extremely limited X display capability.

No networking code ... this is not a complete DICOM implementation.

NB. The older unsupported pasckage is no longer being worked on, and contains significant deficiencies in the handling of DICOM messages, and in particular doesn't support sequences :(. It is kept hanging around because it contains some really old translators and tape tools that could conceivably still be useful on rare occasions, but are not worth the effort of porting to the new framework.

Features ...

• Image format support ...
  • DICOM offline file format as per Part 10, and auto-recognition of transfer syntax if no Part 10 meta information header.
  • Parsing/validating DICOM data sets as modules and IODs.
  • Creation/merging of DICOM datasets from text descriptions.
  • Creation of overlays and lookup tables.
  • Post scout lines, created 3D volumes from slices, orthogonal reprojection.
  • Build/dump DICOMDIR.
  • Dump DICOM Structured Reports.
  • Pbmplus extended 16 bit raw format, and PGX format.
  • Raw binary images.
  • Decompress JPEG and deflate transfer syntaxes (using external codecs).
• Test image generation ...
  • SMPTE patterns of arbitrary size and bit depth.
  • Briggs patterns of arbitrary size and bit depth.
• Proprietary image conversions from ...
  • General Electric CT High Speed Advantage (Genesis)
  • General Electric MR Signa 5X (Genesis)
  • General Electric Advantage Windows
  • General Electric CT Pace
  • Picker PQ/IQ CT
  • Siemens CT Somatom Plus family (Native)(incomplete)
  • Imatron CT (incomplete)
  • Shimadzu MR (incomplete)
• Display support ...
  • Generic X Windows display of DICOM images of a single image (only) (but needs pseudo-color not true color visual, e.g. X server run with -depth 8)
    • Multi-frame (not as cine though)
    • Colour (palette and rgb)
    • Greyscale (window level/width for > 8 bits)
    • 3D position reporting if attributes present
    • Overlays in 60xx,3000
    • VOI LUT

Frequent Answers.

• Works greate on MacOS X, or any Unix or Linux variant (with g++ versions ranging from 2.95 through 4.x).
• Can be compiled on Windoze but only with Cygwin (you will need X11 development for imake, gcc, as well as various other utility packages installed). Selected windows binaries are provided for convenience, but not the entire kit due to their size and also the need for the user to supply their own UID root. Note also that these binaries can be run under the ordinary windows command utility without installing Cygwin, by placing the supplied cygwin1.dll in your current PATH. See http://www.cygwin.com/.
• No, the tools are not a network DICOM package, they just convert things to offline file formats.
• Yes, if you don't care about dicom (!) but want to translate from a proprietary format to something else, the tools will help.
• Yes, I do want to hear from ANYONE who knows ANYTHING about any medical image format that is not included, or can provide sample images to reverse engineer.
• No, I cannot make additional binaries available for platform X (too big or I don't have your hardware and you need your own UID root anyway).

Comments, criticism and general abuse are greatly appreciated and should be directed to dclunie@dclunie.com.

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