DICOM:Database

Local databases to organize DICOM header information are often used in medical image applications and workstations. This page is used to organize information and examples.

History

Bill started a thread on the slicer-devel mailing list about improving dicom parsing performance. This message includes a sample sql database schema as an attachment.

At the CTK meeting, Marco Nolden showed a similar approach has been followed as part of the MITK project using DCMTK to fill an SQLite database.

Example Data

• MITK DICOM Schema
• Dump of example database created with schema above
• File:Dicom-database-examples-2010-03-09.zip
• Lorensen's strawman sqlite DICOM schema

Considerations

• It would be ideal if the database schema was standardized and could be used with any DICOM toolkit (GDCM and/or DCMTK).

• The MITK schema is nice because it uses the standard DICOM field names for the columns, for example PatientsUID, ModalitiesInStudy, etc).

• Eventually we could create an ITK IO Factory plugin reader that an read when given an SQLite filename and a query string that specifies a volume. With something like: "/tmp/dicom.db:SeriesUID=1.2.3...." If the SQL database kept the width, height, and pixel data offset then the files could be read quickly without re-parsing.

• Marco plans to contribute a cleaned up version of the MITK code to the CTK git repository.

• Bill proposes a background DICOM import mechanism.