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Hi Massimo and others

I finally have access to a DICOM box (several in fact). But my first job will be to extract some basic data (like patient name, date of birth, gender, type of scan, date of scan etc) from DICOM files exported from older cameras ( over 13 years worth of scans). The required information is contained in the converted files but they (currently as converted) have meaningless names (like 1327_0).

One option might be to interface to an existing open source toolkit but at this stage I am planning on writing [x]Harbour code to do what I need rather than use third party code.

Regards
xProgrammer

Great news.
I want to ask if you have found something about the protocol that must run on a server,
answering to the requests of the scan machine for obtaining the patients list.
Thanks a lot.
Massimo.

Hi Massimo

I am slowly wading through the "mountains" of specifications with regards to DICOM and will have to do the simplest things first. But I will locate that information if I can (I am going to want to do that too) and stay in touch.

Regards
xProgrammer

Hi Massimo

Have made some real progress on the DICOM front, at least as far as reading DICOM files (which are, I understand, formatted the same way in general as DICOM messages). I now have Harbour code that can traverse a DICOM file, read every attribute contained therein, and recognise the attributes it wants to capture. At this stage I have been working only with a single DICOM file containing a single image / raw data. So I have to test it against more files and get it to optionally scan a directory rather than process a single file and to write the data it recognises to a data file. It also needs a good clean up as it shows the scars of "development on the run" as I learned more about DICOM and could do with improved error detection and handling. I also note that the scans I have access to are nuclear medicine scans although the basic code should be fairly widely applicable. It has been written in Harbour but converting to xHarbour would be easy.

I'm quite happy to send you (or others here) my code if it is of any use or you want to become involved in its development. My present understanding is that you need is more in the message exchange area which I do plan to get in to after this and I will most certainly keep you posted.

Since DICOM relates to a fairly specialised area (mainly medical imaging) I wont clog Antonio's forum with developmental code if no-one else is going to be interested at this stage.

Regards
xProgrammer

Fantastic. I'm very interested to test your program for reading informations inside Dicom Image files.
You can write me at my email address, that is massimo at linossi.it
Thanks a lot.

Hi Massimo

Have sent you an email with code as it currently stands. Does read (at least those that I have tested) DICOM files but lots more work to be done before it is of any real use.

If anyone else is interested in accessing DICOM files or in DICOM message exchange from [x]Harbour then post a reply here and I can keep you informed of any progress etc. But since it is a pretty narrow area of interest / application most discussion / information passing is probably best handled by email rather than clogging up this site.

Regards
xProgrammer