ITK/Release 4/DICOM/MetaData

Question

How can ITK handle DICOM dataset within its framework. By design DICOM carries much more than just the Pixel Data, special handling need to be added to the DICOM ImageIO to handle this DICOM dataset (containing Patient information, protocol acuiqisiton parameters).

Current Solution

It uses the MetaDataDictionary to store all the meta information. Currently :

• ASCII based information is passed as is
• Binary based information is converted using mime64 encoding

This implementation currently suffers:

• slow down reading pipeline
• need to reimplement MetaData filters at ITK (duplicate effort from DICOM toolkit)

Proposed Solution

Have a itk::DICOMDataSet interface which has concrete sublclass (dcmtk or gdcm). So that filter for metadata can be quickly constructed using third party libary.

This process:

• greatly speed up reading as no copying or converting of information (no potential loss) occur
• this reduce code duplication

Current implementation available at:

• https://github.com/malaterre/ITKDICOM/blob/master/itkDICOMDataSet.h
• https://github.com/malaterre/ITKDICOM/blob/master/itkDICOMDataSet.cxx