vtk-dicom
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dgobbi
The future of vtk-dicom
This is an announcement. The vtk-dicom repository is going to split.
Currently, this repository serves two purposes:
- It provides the vtkDICOMReader, vtkDICOMWriter, and several related classes.
- It provides the 'dicomtools' command-line tools for wrangling DICOM files.
The first purpose would be better served if those classes were kept within the main VTK repository, rather than here. So that is where they will go, for VTK 9. The vtk-dicom repository will remain to serve users of VTK 6, 7, and 8 and I will continue to respond to requests for bug fixes.
The second purpose would be better served by a package that doesn't depend on VTK. In other words, a C++ DICOM library with a collection of utility programs. Yes, I know that we already have DCMTK and GDCM. I find both of them to be incredibly useful, even indispensable. But there is room for additional libraries, and additional tools.
Thank you dgobbi for making/maintaining such a great project! In my opinion, vtk-dicom repo contains a much more detailed (and easily comprehended) documentation than that most of the VTK classes have, it would be really appreciated if these docs could also be merged into VTK 9!
Hi David,
Thanks for making vtk-dicom a public project and for the hard work that went into its development and maintenance.
Given the above plan of integration with VTK 9, I had a look at the sources of VTK 9.0.1 and I was not able to find dicom "stuff" that seems to relate to this project. Just to confirm with you ... should users at this time still handle vtk-dicom as an external project?
Thank you !
Best Regards,
Andrea
Hi Andrea,
It will be a few more months before the integration with VTK 9 is complete.
If you are comfortable with building VTK from source, then the easiest thing is to enable vtkDICOM as a remote module when you configure VTK with CMake:
//Enable the module. Dicom classes and utilities
VTK_MODULE_ENABLE_VTK_vtkDICOM:STRING=WANT
Then vtk-dicom will be built as part of the VTK build (VTK will automatically grab it from github).