Dicom the easy way

I have been searcing for a while for an open source DICOM library. The thing I hate the most about open source is that many things are started by one man shops, and after a while development stops. A good example of a nice Dicom library is OpenDicom. See www.opendicom.org. Problem is that development is stopped and the documentation is not that great.

I wanted to report on a great Dicom library I came across today. It is called ClearCanvas See www.clearcanvas.ca

It is unbelievable how accessible thay made dicom file access and dicom file viewing.
I wanted to modify some dicom file programmatically in VS 2005. You can do this very easily with the Clearcanvas SDK. The SDK is vary well documented and it took me about 30 minutes to get code going to change a patient Id in a dicom image, somthing I was not able to do very easily with other open source dicom libraries.

The library is also documented very well, with sample code, and the site has a good forum.

Here is the code:

using System;

using System.Collections.Generic;

using System.ComponentModel;

using System.Data;

using System.Drawing;

using System.Text;

using System.Windows.Forms;

using ClearCanvas.Dicom;

namespace CCDicom

{

    public partial class DicomAttibuteViewer : Form

    {

        public DicomAttibuteViewer()

        {

            InitializeComponent();

        }

 

        private void btGo_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)

        {

            DicomFile _df = new DicomFile(@"C:\user\DotNet\OpenDicom\DicomSampleFiles\00000014.dcm");

            _df.Load(DicomReadOptions.Default);

            DicomAttributeCollection _ds = _df.DataSet;

            foreach (DicomAttribute _da in _ds)

            {

                if (_da.Tag.Group == 16 && _da.Tag.Element == 32)

                {

                    // Patient ID

                    _da.SetString(0, "mypatientid");

                }

                if (_da.Tag.Group == 10)

                {

                }

                this.listBox1.Items.Add(_da.Tag +"->" + _da.ToString());

            }

            _df.Save(@"c:\user\DotNet\OpenDicom\DicomSampleFiles\erik1.dcm");

 

        }

    }

}