CtkDICOM in Slicer4

Background

3D Slicer version 4 has been under development for several years and has grown along side CTK. The DICOM support in Slicer4 draws heavily from the ctkDICOM effort and can serve as an example of how the CTK code can be used and what steps still need to be taken to make a more general tool. This page was prepared as an outline for discussion at the November 2011 CTK Hackfest.

Driving Use cases for Slicer4 DICOM

The AMIGO Suite at Brigham and Women's Hospital is the focus of much image guided therapy development with Slicer4 as a main component. Typical usage includes:

• DICOM listener (manually or automatically push to slicer)
• Query/Retrieve diagnostic scans from hospital PACS or previous procedure scans from Syngo Via (local PACS in AMIGO)
• Ideally: Slicer Data Bundle to store planning information in PACS

Other uses cases include:

• Import DICOM studies for research
• Use DICOM as format to save, organize, and share research processing results

Current Capabilities

See Slicer4 DICOM documentation page.

• Import to ctkDICOMDatabase
• Display with ctkDICOMAppWidget
  • thumbnails
  • autoplay
  • window/level
  • pan-zoom
• Load into Slicer
  • By Patient (multiple volumes)
  • By Study (multiple volumes)
  • By Series (single volumes)
• Listener loads automatically into ctkDICOMDatabase
• Query using ctkDICOMQueryWidget
  • configure nodes and ae titles
  • C-MOVE to listener (and into database)
• Export image data from Slicer
  • Slicer Volume becomes DICOM Series
  • User selects destination study (defines metadata)
• Send from ctkDICOMDatabase to remote listener
• Slicer Data Bundle (WIP)
  • Slicer scene and all data saved to zip file
  • zip file embedded as private creator tag in secondary capture