Waveforms in DICOM

[Carmelo]

Hi there,

I have seen you have been investigating and working in the implementation of waveform data (such as vital sign data) into DICOM and that you included a DCMTK module for this purpose called dcmwave, right?

I was interested in this since one of our investigation projects we are working in goes into this direction. So, my question is, is it available as part of the DCMTK binaries? were can i find it?

thanks in advanced,
Carmelo

[Michael Onken]

Hi Carmelo,

this module is currently only internally available. Maybe it is part of the next release, but we are not sure about that. At this time, dcmwave consists of three components:

1) a library that deals witch groups, channels and sample values
2) a "demo application" to dump sample values to console
3) a "demo application" to modify single sample values or to delete channels

It seems like there is an increasing demand for that module...
e. g. in this topic here.

What kind of functions you would like see in such a module?

Regards,
Michael

[Carmelo]

Hi michael,

What u exactly mean with "an application to dump sample values to console"? like dcmdump does?

I am interested in some kind of viewer of this type of objects...well not a viewer but maybe such a tool like "dcmwave-to-png" or any other imaging format? A 'visual' dump of the waveform data(for instance to be used through a WADO server to serve this kind of items).
Some tool will be useful too to 'dicomize' waveform data in other formats such as MFER, SCP-ECG or IHE. Did you have thought in something like that?

Right now, to modify and/or manipulate values or waveform channels is not on my mind... I'm more interested in standaritzation process of the different kind of waveforms to store and be able then to "present" to some final user in a dicom viewer as an "image".

cheers

[Michael Onken]

Hi Carmelo,

What u exactly mean with "an application to dump sample values to console"? like dcmdump does?

Yes, it dumps sample values as a comma seperated list to the console.

I am interested in some kind of viewer of this type of objects...well not a viewer but maybe such a tool like "dcmwave-to-png" or any other imaging format? A 'visual' dump of the waveform data(for instance to be used through a WADO server to serve this kind of items).

So far we have done no work regarding visualization of waveform files. You could take a look at David Clunies (very simple) viewer for ECG files which also opens SCP-ECG files. You can download the software here and a related paper here. A DICOM Waveform export to PNG or, more likely, to some vector format like SVG would be interesting.

Some tool will be useful too to 'dicomize' waveform data in other formats such as MFER, SCP-ECG or IHE. Did you have thought in something like that?

Yes, when writing the software I thought about that. However, at this time there are no import filters implemented, but that could be possible. As far as I know, implementing SCP-ECG is a bit tedious, MFER should be simpler.

We've got to bring the dcmwave code into a "releasable" state and then we'll see, how to continue with that and if there is a demand for special features.

Thank you for your input so far

Regards,
Michael