[vtkusers] DICOM confusion (GDCM? ITK?)

[Christopher Denter]

Hello,

I'm new to VTK and DICOM.

I have a series of DICOM files that I want to render with VTK. I can load those files in OsiriX and perform the usual volume rendering on them without problems.
Now I also want to use that dataset in my own application. Using vtkDICOMImageReader I get this error message:
	"""vtkVolumeRayCastMapper (0x13581920): Cannot volume render data of type short, only unsigned char or unsigned short."""

If I understand correctly, VTK's DICOM-reading capabilities are somewhat limited, so I have to use GDCM (or ITK?). Is that correct?
I then tried to compile GDCM 2.0.13 with CMake 2.8.0 on OSX 10.6.2, but the configure process fails with this error: http://paste.pocoo.org/show/150837/
Since I suspect this is a CMake error, I already created a bug report for this: http://www.cmake.org/Bug/view.php?id=9898
On Ubuntu 9.10 I installed python-vtkgdcm. I can then 'import vtkgdcm', but the GDCM test Utilities/VTK/Testing/Python/TestvtkGDCMImageReader.py just segfaults.

Now I just want to make sure that my initial assumptions (i.e., that I have to use GDCM for this) are correct before I wait a long time for a fix that doesn't actually help me.
My dataset is just a folder with many *.dcm files in it, and a DICOMDIR file.

So: Do I need GDCM in addition to VTK for this?

All the best,
	Christopher