[vtk-developers] ARB - vtkDICOMImageReader

[Sebastien BARRE]

At 3/31/2003 12:46 PM, Turek, Matthew W (Research) wrote:

>I have written a vtkDICOMImageReader based on the DICOMParser used in ITK.
>I am willing to open source this class.  Is there interest in having me add
>this to VTK?  Currently it will read either single images or a directory of
>images.
>
>I would need to add the class to IO and a directory under Utilities for the
>DICOMParser. There are no modifications to existing vtk classes.
>
>Should I send code to the ARB before I check it in?

Our experience at Kitware is that anything involving DICOM is tricky (as 
you probably know), especially when it comes to write something robust 
enough to support the huge number of "wrong" DICOM implementations out 
there :) We have used ctnlib for some time in our internal DICOM reader, 
and we are slowly switching to DCMTK now.

A DICOM reader has been a request for a long time, so adding this class 
would be a good thing. Nevertheless, it would also probably mean that you 
should expect to support this class a lot because of users "complaining" it 
does not read their vendor-specific DICOM files.

Some thoughts:

- What are you planning to put in Utilities/ ? If it is a library, and it 
is used in ITK already, there might be a "multiple symbols"  issue for 
people using both VTK and ITK within the same project.
- It should be a subclass of vtkImageReader2.
- Does this code or lib use features we don't support in VTK (like the bool 
type)
- Does this class support Encapsulated Syntax (JPEG for example) ? What 
kind of scalars does it support (and how are you handling the Shift/Scale 
issue) ?
- How are you handling the orientation/position of a slice ?

Thanks

--
Sebastien Barre