Download abstract - Med-e-Tel

Solving Annoying DICOM Problems Using IMAGEJ and the Tudor DICOM tools
J. Hermen, C. Moll, A. Jahnen
Centre de Recherche Public Henri Tudor, CR SANTEC, Luxembourg,
[email protected]
DICOM (Digital Imaging and Communication in Medicine) is the standard for the storage,
transfer and the processing in medical imaging. The standard defines not only the file format
to store the image data, it defines as well a data dictionary for meta information and a network
communication protocol. Today, DICOM is used in most radiology departments for the
implementation of RIS (Radiology Information System) and PACS (Picture Archiving and
Communication System) to ensure smooth operation and vendor independence. For standard
workflows and applications the systems are well tested.
Besides the normal hospital workflow, for which the PACS fulfils all the needs, there are
often particular problems in importing, converting or treating images that need to be solved
contemporary by providing an in-house solution.
The TUDOR DICOM Tools are a free and Open Source Java library to perform high-level
DICOM operations. It is based on dcm4che (dcm4che, http://www.dcm4che.org/) version 2,
the Java Advanced Imaging API (http://java.sun.com/products/java-media/jai/iio.html) (JAI)
and ImageJ (http://rsbweb.nih.gov/ij/), a public domain image processing program developed
at the National Institutes of Health.
It offers functionality to read and write DICOM files from a disc or DICOM CD, work with
the DICOM header (change values or make them anonymous), send and receive images over
the network, query images from a PACS server and transcode images. The following DICOM
network services are provided by the tools: C-ECHO-SCU/SCP, STORAGE-SCP,
QUERY/RETRIEVE-SCU. Additionally it offers components to view DICOM images with
features like windowing, zooming, shifting, measuring etc. The DICOM open dialogue with
integrated store and send functionalities can not only be used to view images, but to retrieve
images from one modality, store images into a DICOMDIR which can be burned as DICOM
CD or send them to another DICOM capable modality.
The toolkit can be used in two ways: First of all it provides ImageJ Plugins that allow the
interactive use of the provided features within the ImageJ environment to find a solution for a
particular imaging problem. A usage within the ImageJ Macro Language is possible as well.
Furthermore It can be used as a library in own custom applications. Several sample
applications are shown as case studies to demonstrate the power and the ease of use of the
toolkit. This includes the Tudor DICOM Viewer (a simple but yet powerful DICOM viewer),
DICOM Transcode-Node (A DICOM note to integrate and convert compressed DICOM
images) and several more.
The toolkit is powerful and easy to use. Custom applications can be tested within the ImageJ
environment and then implemented in a Java application. The presented use case applications
show how this power.
Keywords: medical imaging, DICOM, ImageJ, radiology, custom software