Medical Image Format

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Format

  1. DICOM: (Digital Imaging and COmmunications in Medicine) meta info + raw data
  2. nrrd: meta info (e.g., sizes, dimension, encoding, endian) + raw data

The meta info in nrrd mainly consists of the format of raw data while the meta info in DICOM contains the detailed information of patient, study, and series.
There exist matlab and python functions to read DICOM and nrdd files.

  • MATLAB

DICOM is generally a directory containing a sequence of slices while nrrd is a single file. The meta info of DICOM is more complicated and thus more error-prone than that of nrrd. Use DICOMPatcher to fix up DICOM files if errors occur when loading them to 3D Slicer.

Software

  1. 3D Slicer: cross-platform, compatible with different formats (e.g., DICOM and nrrd), and convert between them.

  2. Other softwares to view medical images: http://www.cabiatl.com/mricro/dicom/#links