[vtkusers] Can I read the dicom files in vtk using the implem ented classes in Slicer?

[Sebastien BARRE]

At 11/26/2001 10:08 AM, Day, Robert wrote:
>I too use Sébastien's dicom2 and it is a great tool.

Thanks.

>However, recently on the ImageJ mailing list someone asked about renaming
>DICOM files.  I suggested dicom2, but he was using MacOs X, for which a
>binary does not exist.  This leads me to ponder whether more portable DICOM
>handling could become a part of vtk.

What features would you request inside VTK ?

>Certainly it would be a non-trivial
>task, given the size and ever-expanding nature of the DICOM standard.

Definitely.

>As ever, I am not in a position to do the work myself at the moment, but
>perhaps Sébastien is willing to make his source available, which would
>certainly make the task easier.

Well, the good news is that I moved from France to work at Kitware now :) 
The "bad" news is that none of my projects involve DICOM at the moment and 
thus would justify that I dedicate some of my working-time (and Kitware's 
ressources) to dicom2. Anyway, this has always been the case, dicom2 was a 
small tool I wrote to fulfill some of my PhD needs years ago and evolved 
way beyond it was intended to :)

Being part of a company that is confident in the open source model, the 
logical step would be to open the source code. Sadly, this would not be a 
very nice gift to anyone of you :) dicom2 is in a state where actually it 
is difficult to maintain and expand : it definitely needs a rewrite from 
the ground-up. DICOM is a tricky protocol and I'm not sure messing up with 
that code would be a good thing for someone who does not know it, since it 
could create corrupted DICOM files, something you definitely should avoid 
in a medical context.

My plan is to rewrite it as a DICOM library (and a dicom2 binary using it). 
Ideally I would use our technology and our open-source tools (CMake, cable 
or the VTK wrappers) to make it portable (Unix, Win, Mac) and scriptable 
(C++ API with Tcl/Python/Java bindings). Most probably next year, since I 
do not have a home computer now and my free time is more dedicated to 
settle here and socialize :)

Sebastien