DICOM¶
The DICOM module provides functionality to import data from DICOM files and PACS servers. DICOM stands for Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine and is a standard for managing medical imaging information and related data. The ImFusion Suite is able to load images, Radiotherapy (RT) Structure Sets and segmentations from DICOM.
Importing DICOM files¶
One way to load DICOM images is through the filesystem. For the sake of simplicity, we are only considering DICOM representing images for here. A single file therefore represents a single 2D image. DICOM Images are part of a hierarchical structure: A patient contains one or more studies, a study contains one or more series and a series contains one or more images. You can think of a study corresponding to a day the patient visits the hospital and a series corresponding to a single examination. For example, a patient being first examined with an MR scanner and afterwards by an ultrasound machine, might lead to a single study with two series. This is not always the case, but helps to visualize the DICOM data model.
To import DICOM data, click the Import button in the top toolbar and select the DICOM tab. You can now select a directory you want to scan for DICOM data. Since DICOM files are usually distributed over several folders, you should make sure that Search subdirectories is checked. If the selected directory contains DICOM data, you will see something like the following list:
The results are displayed hierarchically with the patients on the first level, studies on the second, series on the third, and images on the last level. Images are collapsed by default, since the interesting part is usually the series. Note that the patient names in the above example were anonymised by using only descriptive names like “Abdomen/Kidney”.
The results can be filtered by entering a search term, like the patient name or part of a study or series description. Additionally it can be filtered by modality (like CT or MR) or by a date range (e.g. the acquisition date).
The dialog only displays the available series, but doesn’t load them yet. To select a series for import mark the checkbox next to the series entry. You can also select a patient or study to select all sub-series. To load the selected series and close the dialog, click the Ok button in the lower right.
In general, a single series will result in a single dataset in the ImFusion Suite. A notable exception is when a series contains both 2D and 3D images.
Importing from PACS¶
PACS stands for Picture Archiving and Communication System and basically describes a remote server which serves DICOMs. In the ImFusion Suite, you first have to add a PACS server configuration in the Global DICOM Settings. To receive DICOM images, your client needs to be registered on the PACS server by your PACS administrator. The administrator can also provide you the necessary configuration values.
Once configured, you can select the server in the PACS tab in the import dialog. If you are working with a large hospital PACS, you might want to specify a filter for the patient name or study description before clicking Scan. Without a filter, you might receive an enormous list of patients and the scan will take very long. The filters also accepts wildcards like ‘*’ to match zero or more characters and ‘?’ to match a single characters.
The results are displayed in similar fashion as above with the exception that series are not loaded directly and a ‘…’ placeholder is shown instead. This is because downloading a series from the PACS takes considerable more time than listing the patient and study information (due to the size of the image’s pixel data). Clicking on the ‘…’ will download all series belonging to the study and list them like above.