Proposals:Make GDCM the default DICOM

Proposal

Make GDCM to be the default DICOM implementation in itk.

Rationale

GDCM is a full featured DICOM read/write library that has an active development community. DICOMImageIO2 served the Insight community for a few years, but, it lacks DICOM write capablities and does not support all of the tags that itk is now using. DICOMImageIO2 no longer has an active developer community.

Roadblocks to the Change-Over

GDCM does not support all of the DICOMImageIO2 API's:

1. DICOMSeriesFilenames has a SetDirectory method while GDCMSerieFilenames uses SetInputDirectory and SetOutputDirectory. This roadblock can be removed if we add a SetDirectory method that applies the existing SetInputDirectory method.

2. DICOMSeriesFilenames can handle multiple series in one directory. Although the gcdm library appears to support multiple series in a directory, GDCMSeriesFilenames does not. This roadblock can be removed if GDCMSeriesFilenames adopts the DICOMSeriesFilenames API.

There may be other incompatabilities that should be discussed here.

General User Comments

GDCM has been much more useful and more fully implemented than DICOMImageIO2. The development group at Iowa fully supports this change.