[Insight-users] Reading DICOM fields

[Luis Ibanez]

Hi Jenny,

The DICOMSeriesFileNames object in ITK
is using the field:

        SERIES_INSTANCE_UID

with tag

           (0020,000e)

as identifier of the series.


You will find this code in the file

  Insight/Code/IO/
     itkDICOMSeriesFileNames.cxx


You could simply create a new DICOMSeriesFileNames
class that will gather filenames based in different
criteria.

You could also use external means for figuring out
the set of files names that belong to the same dataset
and then compose a list of filenames to be passed to
the ITK ImageSeriesReader.

The format for the list of filenames is simply a

        std::vector< std::string >

so, it is pretty easy to compose.... once you figure
out what files go with what files.

But again, if this is something that you need to do
only once a month, I would  rather use MRIConvert and
preorganize the data. Using MRIConvert it will probably
take you less than an hour to get a DICOM directory
organized into ITK readable datasets (Analyze/MetaImage).

You may also want to try using the free version of
VolView that you can download from
http://www . kitware . com/products/volview . html

With VolView you can read the DICOM files and then
save them in another file format... with the obvious
additional benefit of visualizing the data set using
volume rendering and/or iso-surface extraction.



Please let us know if you have further questions,


Thanks,


    Luis


------------------------
Jenny Simpson wrote:

> Which DICOM fields/tags are used by Itk in separating DICOM files into
> different series'?  If we know this we might be able to regenerate the
> DICOM files in such a way that the volumes can be differentiated into
> series' automatically by Itk.  What fields/tags are normally used to
> differentiate volumes within a set of DICOM files?  Thanks for the other
> ideas too.
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Jenny Simpson
> Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute
> University of Utah
> 
> 
>