Documentation/DICOM Overview

Overview of DICOM functionality in CTK

General DICOM components

CTK aims at providing the user with reusable components for Query/Retrieve of data from PACS systems and the local file management of DICOM data. More details can be found on the overview page for the CtkDICOM showcase application.

Status

CTK provides the core functionality for DICOM networking and databases in 3D Slicer version 4.0 and the MITK Workbench which provide working examples of how to customize ctkDICOM functionality for an application. As CTK evolves, the ctkDICOM functionality should become a fully general purpose query/retrieve/store infrastructure on top of DCMTK with a corresponding set of Qt widgets.

This is still a work-in-progress with several features to be finished. As of late 2011, ctkDICOM support Query/Retrieve via CGET and CMOVE at the core level, but does not expose all of the options via the Qt widgets and there are other outstanding integration features to be completed.

Organization

• Application level: ctkDICOM sample application within CTK or other end-user application such as slicer
• Widget level: set of customized Qt widgets for common DICOM-related activities (image display, database interaction, server parameters, search parameters...)
• Core level: Qt Core wrappers around DCMTK primitives. This layer provides a Qt signals/slots/properties interface to features such as starting, monitoring, interrupting DICOM transactions.

Build/Usage

Use CTK_ENABLE_DICOM at the superbuild level of CMake.

The ctkDICOM application integrates the major functionality.

DICOM application hosting

This is a special topic covered here.