[vtkusers] vtk + DICOM (call for Sebastien Barre)

[Eric Boix]

    Dear Marcelo (and hopefuly dear Sebastien Barre :-),

Marcelo> Is possible with  vtk librarys read Dicom.

   To my knowledge vtkImageReader has a few format specific derived classes
(vtkBMPReader, vtkTIFFReader, vtkPNMReader) but none of which being
related to Dicom formats. Nevetheless vtkImageReader has all the required
parameters that enables this class to read Dicom Images. BUT in order
to use it, it will require some extra (outside of vtk) knowledge of
the fairly complicated Dicom format....

More precisely you will need to be able to explore the Dicom header
file by other means :
  like CTN see http://www.erl.wustl.edu/DICOM/ctn.html
  or dcmtk see
  http://www.offis.uni-oldenburg.de/projekte/dicom/soft-docs/soft01_e.html)
Then plug the results (like the size of image, how it is represented,
the size of the header that needs to be skipped when you have multiple
images in one file....) into vtkImageReader.

    I would be delighted to hear Sebastien Barre's point of view on this
specialised subject since he has a deep understanding of BOTH vtk and
Dicom : 
 * see http://www.barre.nom.fr/vtk/links.html for his VTK link page.
 * see http://www.barre.nom.fr/medical/dicom2/index.html for his
   free dicom2 utility toolkit.
   [ Alas his dicom2 toolkit is not opensource (Sebastien, please flame me if
     I'm wrong on this point). Hence, since sources are not available,
     it will be of no help to you for exploring the Dicom headers. You won't be
     able to wrap in it Python or Tcl and then call vtkImageReader with the
     results obtained... I once failed poorly in using Swig on Dcmtk header
     files (heavy duty C++). ]

   Yours,
   Eric Boix.

----
Eric.Boix at creatis.insa-lyon.fr
http://www.creatis.insa-lyon.fr/