About DICOM.pm

DICOM.pm is a Perl library that allows Perl programs to read the headers of medical image files conforming to DICOM standards.

DICOM (Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine) is a standard designed to allow medical image files to be transferred, stored and viewed on different makes of computers. Perl is a multiplatform language that excels at system tasks such as file manipulation. It's easy to learn, particularly if you are familiar with C or the Unix shells and utility programs.

This library provides the methods to read and parse a DICOM file, then to recover the contents of each header element by their standard DICOM group and element codes. Header element values can be edited (either through the GUI or command line) and the modified file written back to disk. I have included a couple of simple demonstration programs based on this library: one that dumps a file header to the screen, and one that performs an editing operation to the headers of a number of files (this is useful when you have files with errors in them). I use the library for many of my utility programs that edit, move, rename, and index DICOM files.

Features

• Reads and parses DICOM files.
• Allows each element in the header to be recovered by group and element code.
• File headers can be edited and saved.
• Graphical user interface (can be supressed) displays the header in tabular form.
• Header elements can be sorted by group/element, type, length, or name.
• Command line options allow sorting by field, or forced non-graphical output.

Future Plans

• Add access to pixel values, using PDL for data manipulation.
• Add different output formats.
• Allow multiple files to be opened and edited.
• Eventually implement the communications protocols and databasing features to allow this to operate as a DICOM server.