11 DICOM Images

11.3 Loading a DicomImage

DICOM files and folders are read using the DicomReader class. The reader populates a supplied DicomImage with slices, forming the full 3D(+time) image. The basic pattern is as follows:

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String DICOM_directory = ...               // define directory of interest
DicomReader reader = new DicomReader();    // create a new reader
// read all files in a directory, returning a newly constructed image
DicomImage image = reader.read(null, DICOM_directory);

The first argument in the read(...) command is an existing image in which to append slices. In this case, we pass in null to signal that a new image is to be created.

In some cases, we might wish to exclude certain files, such as meta-data files that happen to be in the DICOM folder. By default, the reader attempts to read all files in a given directory, and will print out an error message for those it fails to detect as being in a valid DICOM format. To limit the files to be considered, we allow the specification of a Java Pattern, which will test each filename against a regular expression. Only files with names that match the pattern will be included. For example, in the following, we limit the reader to files ending with the “dcm” extension.

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String DICOM_directory = ...               // define directory of interest
DicomReader reader = new DicomReader();    // create a new reader
Pattern dcmPattern = Pattern.compile(".*\\.dcm") ;  // files ending with .dcm
// read all files in a directory, returning a newly constructed image
DicomImage image = reader.read(null, DICOM_directory, dcmPattern, /*subdirs*/ false);

The pattern is applied to the absolute filename, with either windows and mac/linux file separators (both are checked against the regular expression). The method also has an option to recursively search for files in subdirectories. If the full list of files is known, then one can use the method:

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public DicomImage read(DicomImage im, List<File> files);

which will load all specified files.

11.3.1 Time-dependent images

In most cases, time-dependent images will be properly assembled using the previously mentioned methods in the DicomReader. Each slice should have a temporal position identifier that allows for the separate image stacks to be separated. However, we have found in practice that at times, the temporal position identifier is omitted. Instead, each stack might be stored in a separate DICOM folder. For this reason, additional read methods have been added that allow manual specification of the time index:

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public DicomImage read(DicomImage im, List<File> files, int temporalPosition);
public DicomImage read(DicomImage im, String directory, Pattern filePattern,
                       boolean checkSubdirectories, int temporalPosition);

If the supplied temporalPosition is non-negative, then the temporal position of all included files will be manually set to that value. If negative, then the method will attempt to read the temporal position from the DICOM header information. If no such information is available, then the reader will guess the temporal position to be one past the last temporal position in the original image stack (or 0 if im == null). For example, if the original image has temporal positions {0, 1, 2}, then all appended slices will have a temporal position of three.

11.3.2 Image formats

The DicomReader attempts to automatically decode any pixel information embedded in the DICOM files. Unfortunately, there are virtually an unlimited number of image formats allowed in DICOM, so there is no way to include native support to decode all of them. By default, the reader can handle raw pixels, and any image format supported by Java’s ImageIO framework, which includes JPEG, PNG, BMP, WBMP, and GIF. Many medical images, however, rely on lossless or near-lossless encoding, such as lossless JPEG, JPEG 2000, or TIFF. For these formats, we provide an interface that interacts with the third-party command-line utilities provided by ImageMagick (http://www.imagemagick.org). To enable this interface, the ImageMagick utilities identify and convert must be available and exist somewhere on the system’s PATH environment variable.

ImageMagick Installation
To enable ImageMagick decoding, required for image formats not natively supported by Java (e.g. JPEG 2000, TIFF), download and install the ImageMagick command-line utilities from: http://www.imagemagick.org/script/binary-releases.php
The install path must also be added to your system’s PATH environment variable so that ArtiSynth can locate the identify and convert utilities.

Bibliography