DICOMDIR files reader for using in computer assisted diagnosis and surgery.docVIP

DICOMDIR FILES READER FOR USING IN COMPUTER ASSISTED DIAGNOSIS AND SURGERY Ricardo Villegas, Guillermo Montilla, Hyxia Villegas Centro de Procesamiento de Imágenes, Facultad de Ingeniería, Universidad de Carabobo, Valencia, Venezuela e-mail: ravillegas@.ve Abstract The present applications for surgical planning and computer assisted surgery need to handle images sets which come from different acquisition modalities and are stored in DICOM format. These images are usually accompanied by DICOMDIR directory files, which compile and structure the information contained in the DICOM image files in a hierarchically way. Therefore, it is important that medical applications can read DICOMDIR files to facilitate the organized access to the images and their contents. During the medical application software development, it is of common practice to make use of specialized open source development libraries or application programming interfaces (APIs) in order to solve requirements of computation and scientific visualization. Some of these libraries include DICOM files readers, but they do not have DICOMDIR files readers which can be easily integrated into the applications. As a solution for this necessity, this work presents the implementation of a DICOMDIR files reader module based in the DCMTK library. The output from the reading process is a data tree containing the DICOM images and their related radiological studies information, which can be browsed in a structured and easy way through navigation interfaces. The developed reader was integrated into a neurosurgical preoperatory planning application, successfully showing its usefulness as a tool for browsing and selecting DICOM images, which are used later in processes of fusion, segmentation, volumetric reconstruction, navigation and surgical simulation. Keywords: DICOM, DICOMDIR, Medical Images, Navigation Interface, Open Source. 1. Introduction The DICOM 3.0 (Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine) standard [2,8] e