26 February 2010

oro.dicom 0.2.4

The R package oro.dicom is a major revision, and improvement, on the previous package DICOM.  New features include
  • Increased speed
  • Uploading only header information (for restricted memory)
  • Reading implicit value representations (VR's)
  • Parsing SequenceItem tags (undefined lengths are allowed)
  • Integration with oro.nifti to convert DICOM to NIfTI
Provided below is a straightforward application of the oro.dicom package to an example data set from the ADNI (Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative).

The list object from reading all 166 DICOM files has two fields: header and image. Each hdr element contains the DICOM header fields associated with that file and the corresponding img element contains the PixelData tag.  The first DICOM file contains 312 DICOM header fields. Using extractHeader() one can obtain the value of a DICOM header field in either text or numeric format.


The image above is the mid-sagittal view of this subject from his/her MPRAGE acquisition.