DCMTK 3.6 Released

Our friends at OFFIS have just announced the release of DCMTK 3.6.

This is exciting news for the medical imaging community and particularly for those who use Kitware’s open-source medical imaging projects such as CTK and Slicer.  We have come to greatly appreciate DCMTK’s comprehensive support for DICOM networking and DICOM object management.  Over the next several months we will be updating our packages to use this new release.

The official announcement from OFFIS is given below.    The list of new features is impressive.

Congratulations to the DCMTK team at OFFIS!

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ANNOUNCEMENT

Version 3.6.0 of the OFFIS DCMTK (DICOM ToolKit) software is now available for public release.  This release includes the following main changes over the previous version 3.5.4:

• DCMTK 3.6.0 now also builds correctly with GNU gcc 4.1 (and higher), Visual Studio 2008 and 2010.

• Tested with latest versions of the following operating systems/environments:

• Linux on x86 and x86_64
• FreeBSD on x86 and x86_64
• MacOS X on x86_64
• Windows on x86 and x86_64
• Cygwin and MinGW/MSys on x86

For a complete list of tested systems and compilers, see the INSTALL file.

• The CMake build system can now also be used with other operating systems than Windows.  However, GNU autoconf is still supported and should be preferred on systems where the CMake project files fail.

• New module oflog introduces a unified DCMTK-wide approach for logging based on the log4cplus library.  Direct output to console, file, syslog and event log.  All DCMTK command line tools now have the same set of logging options.

• New module dcmjpls adds support for JPEG-LS compressed DICOM images based on the CharLS library.  The tools dcmcjpls and dcmdjpls allow for compressing and decompressing DICOM images with JPEG-LS from the command line.

• New tool img2dcm allows for converting JPEG and BMP images to various DICOM image IODs, e.g. old and new Secondary Capture, Visible Light Photographic. The underlying C++ class library can also be used separately.

• New tool dcm2pdf allows for extracting PDF files from DICOM Encapsulated PDF Storage SOP instances.

• New tool dcml2pnm allows for converting JPEG-LS compressed DICOM imagesto standard image formats like TIFF or BMP.

• The tools dcmdump and storescu have new options for searching directories recursively for DICOM files.

• The tool dcmdump now also has a colored output of the textual dump.  So far, this option is available on non-Windows systems only (uses ANSI
  escape code).

• The tool dcmodify now also supports reading the value of insert and modify statements from a file.  This is especially useful for large element values.

• The tool dsr2html now also supports the output in HTML 4.01 and XHTML 1.1 format.  There are also new options that affect the rendering result.

• The tool dump2dcm now also supports compressed pixel data.  In addition, the memory requirements for very large data elements have been reduced.

• The tool xml2dcm can now also read binary data (e.g. pixel data) from a separate file.  The corresponding feature is not yet available in dcm2xml.

• The tool storescp now has a new option that allows for accepting all supported transfer syntaxes on a single association.

• The tool wlmscpfs now supports multi-process mode both on Posix and Windows platforms where a new child process is created for each incoming association.

• Refactored code of the tool findscu into a C++ class.  This facilitates re-use of the findscu code in other applications.

• Added further “switches” to the dcmdata module which allow to better cope with incorrectly encoded DICOM files or datasets.  These switches are also available as new options to the tools dcmdump and dcmconv.

• The dcmdata module now also gives access to partial attribute values without loading the complete attribute value into memory, if kept in file.

• The write methods in dcmdata now handle large raw data elements without loading everything into memory.  This allows very large images to be sent over a network connection or to be copied without ever being fully in memory.

• The dcmdata module now has a common interface for the frame-wise accessto compressed and uncompressed pixel data without ever loading the complete object into main memory.

• The dcmimgle/dcmimage module makes use of the new partial access to pixel data for processing large multi-frame images in a stepwise manner.

• The dcmimgle/dcmimage module and related tools now also support a new bilinear and a bicubic scaling algorithm for image magnification. Furthermore, the sigmoid VOI LUT function has been implemented.

• Added support for Colon CAD SR, Spectacle Prescription Report, Macular Grid Thickness and Volume Report as well as Implantation Plan SR documents to the dcmsr module.

• Incorporated fixes to dcmsr module which were introduced by various correction proposals.  Added support for the new optional Preliminary
  Flag.

• DICOMDIR tools and classes now support all new SOP classes and directory record types.  Also added a new operating mode that allows for updating existing entries in a DICOMDIR.

• Introduced general path syntax for accessing nested elements from command line tools like findscu or dcmodify.

• Added methods for checking the value representation (VR) and value multiplicity (VM) of data elements for conformance with the DICOM
  standard.

• Network tools now support transmission and receipt of JPEG-LS and MPEG2 transfer syntaxes.

• Added support for the extended negotiation of user identity to the dcmnet module.  The first tool that makes use of this new feature is storescu.

• Introduced new experimental SCU and SCP classes that act as a C++ wrapper to the still C-based dcmnet module.

• Added new class OFFile that provides a simple encapsulation layer for file based stream I/O and, in particular, provides large file support (LFS)if
  available on the underlying operating system/platform through a single API.

• Out of the box compilation with OpenSSL 1.0.0 is now supported.

• Revised installation directory scheme in order to be more compliant with the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard (FHS) and derived file system standards.

• Added data dictionary including private ASTM tags from DICONDE (Digital Imaging and Communication in Nondestructive Evaluation) standard.

• The DICOM data dictionary as well as the list of SOP classes and transfer syntaxes have been re-worked based on the latest edition of the DICOM standard plus all additionally approved supplements and correction proposals (as of 2010-11-30).  Please note that there have been minor name changes!

• Many bug fixes and minor improvements as usual – see the more than 12,000 lines long CHANGES.360 file for more details.

The DCMTK software can be downloaded via:

http://dicom.offis.de/dcmtk or http://www.dcmtk.org/

Thank you for your contribution!

Greetings from Oldenburg,
Jörg, Marco, Michael and Uli