Re: dicom support

[Judd Storrs]

On Sun, May 2, 2010 at 4:45 PM, Andy Buckle <address@hidden> wrote:
> I hope to implement dicomwrite too. I am not sure there is an easy and
> sane way to get back from a name (eg PatientsName) to a tag (eg
> 0x10,0x10). Any ideas appreciated. I am not too hot at c++, so I may
> be missing something in the GDCM doxygen.

I think the best way to do this is via a dictionary file even though
this may seem more complicated at first glance. Basically this is a
file that as a minimum has a table of keys, value representations,
keywords that are read in. The main benefits of using dictionary files
are that users can customize the file to include definitions for
private tags for vendor extensions. gdcm probably has support for
reading and querying a data dictionary. From what I can tell at the
moment, I think this is gdcm's default data dictionary:

http://gdcm.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/gdcm/trunk/Source/DataDictionary/DICOMV3.dic

Linked from 
http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/gdcm/index.php?title=Data_Dictionary

I'm not sure if gdcm has moved on to an xml format to replace this. In
any case, my guess is that we can create a custom dictionary that uses
the NEMA keyword forms instead of the pretty forms with spaces in
them. Apparently gdcm uses pdf2text and python scripts to extract the
info from the standard we can probably use that. In any case if you
agree that a table is the way to go I can figure out how to update the
dictionary file to a format we want.


--judd