DCMTK 3.6.8 available for public release

[Marco Eichelberg]

ANNOUNCEMENT

Version 3.6.8 of the OFFIS DCMTK (DICOM toolkit) software is now available for public release. This release includes the following main changes over the previous version 3.6.7:

• DCMTK 3.6.8 builds correctly on older and up-to-date versions of GNU gcc (4.8.5 to 12.3.0) Clang (3.4.2 to 15.0.7), Apple Clang (14.0.3 to 15.0.0), and Microsoft Visual Studio (2015 to 2022).
• Tested with the following operating systems/environments (for a complete list of tested systems and compilers, see the INSTALL file):
  • Android on arm64
  • FreeBSD on x86_64
  • Linux on x86_64 and x86
  • MacOS X on x86_64 and arm64
  • NetBSD on x86_64
  • OpenBSD on x86_64
  • OpenIndiana on x86
  • Windows (including MinGW) on x86_64 and x86
• Updated DICOM data dictionary, list of SOP classes, well-known frame of references, transfer syntaxes, code definitions, supported context group classes, and directory record types for DICOM standard release 2023c.
• Support for the Encapsulated Uncompressed Explicit VR Little Endian Transfer Syntax (introduced with CP-2083) is still missing, see https://support.dcmtk.org/redmine/issues/1000 for the current status.
• Updated automatically generated classes in module "dcmrt" (Radiotherapy) based on DICOM 2023b. Also fixed long undiscovered bugs that occurred when iterating over sequence items or when reading RT images.
• Added new module oficonv providing builtin character set conversion in DCMTK. oficonv is enabled by default and, therefore, is chosen over the external libraries iconv and icu as well as stdlibc (iconv). However, one of the other conversion libraries can still be enabled if preferred by the user.
• Added support for the Specific Character Sets "ISO_IR 203" and "ISO 2022 IR 203" (ISO 8859-15, Latin-9) introduced with CP-2113 to the character set conversion.
• Added support for the new RFC 8996 TLS profiles, including support for Application-Layer Protocol Negotiation (ALPN), Server Name Indication (SNI), and other recommendations of RFC 9325 (the current revision of BCP 195).
• Further enhanced DICOM Structured Reporting (SR) module "dcmsr":
  • Added support for Context Groups CID 218 and CID 7551, which are used for TID 1500 "Measurement Report".
  • Implemented changes for CP-2000 by adding support for the SR Template parameters $ImagePurpose or $Purpose to the implementation of TID 1501, 300 and 320.
  • Added "Rendition Selection Document" (introduced with Supplement 202) to the list of supported "ReportTypes" in the XML Schema (XSD).
  • Updated list of known Presentation State, Segmentation and Waveform SOP Classes.
  • Updated mapping of the Defined Terms for the Body Part Examined attribute to associated CID 4031 (Common Anatomic Regions) codes based on part 16.
• Further improved network classes DcmSCU and DcmSCP:
  • Removed note on experimental status of DcmSCU and DcmSCP.
  • Reject wrong called AE Title in DcmSCP (if configured).
  • Allow operating system to choose free port for DcmSCP.
  • Added N-CREATE and N-SET support to DcmSCU.
  • Allow setting individual TCP timeout for every instance of DcmSCU.
  • Introduced new class DcmTLSSCU to bring TLS support to DcmSCU.
• Don't fill in Responding AE Title in log output of A-ASSOCIATE request. DCMTK used to fill in Responding AE Title in the log when an SCU was connecting to a Remote AE. Since obviously the Responding AE Title is not known in the request, the string value should be logged empty.
• Fixed an unexpected behavior when using option --charset-assume (+Ca) together with option --convert-to-utf8 (+U8) for dcm2xml, dsr2html or dsr2xml. Now, the order of evaluating these options is reversed, so that a DICOM file that is missing the Specific Character Set attribute although it is needed (because extended characters are used) can be processed.
• Enabled support for the --print-color (+C) option in dcmdump and dsrdump also on Windows systems. Both the Windows Terminal and the PowerShell support ANSI escape codes, so the color output should work with these tools.
• Enhanced handling of converting IS (Integer String) and DS (Decimal String) values to JSON format. Added new command line options to dcm2json for this purpose.
• Added initial support for Multi-Fragment Video Transfer Syntaxes introduced with Supplement 225. This commit covers the definition of the UID values and the DCMTK-specific definitions that are needed to later enhance support.
• Added JPEG-LS support to img2dcm's regular JPEG plugin.
• Added comparison operators to classes DcmTag and DcmXfer.
• Added support for the official DICOM UID keywords that were originally introduced with CP-1995. These keywords are defined in addition to the DCMTK-specific UID names that have been used for a long time and will still be supported for the foreseeable future.
• Added classes OFIPCMessageQueueServer and OFIPCMessageQueueClient, which implement the server and client side of a message queue for inter-process communication. A server process can create a message queue and receive text messages, and a client process can open the queue and send messages. Depending on the platform, the queues are implemented as Windows Mailslot, Posix message queue or System V message queue.
• CMake-related enhancements and other changes:
  • Fix detection and enabling of modern C++ versions (C++11 and later) for VS. Mainly, it is ensured that the __cplusplus version macro is set accordingly
    when using VS while enabling C++11 or later.
  • The CMake install target now uses the installation directories provided by the GNUInstallDirs package more consistently.
  • The minimum supported CMake version has been increased to 3.0.0.
  • A new, still experimental setting named DCMTK_USE_WIN32_PROGRAMDATA allows data files to be installed in the "ProgramData" directory on Windows.
• The default installation directories for support data, configuration data and documentation now contain the DCMTK release number in the path. This allows multiple versions of DCMTK to be installed in parallel, without generating conflicts for the data dictionary and other data and configuration files.
• Fixed various issues that occurred after the official 3.6.7 release. See CHANGES file for details.

Many people have contributed to this new release of DCMTK, appearing here in alphabetical order. Thank you very much for your support!

Ahmad Hazimeh
Calvin Fong
Dimitri Papadopoulos Orfanos
Franz Reitner
Joger Hansegard
Juhee Kim
Marcus Hennix
Mathieu Malaterre
Michael L. Williams
Oliver Klerx
Peter Klotz
Sharon Brizinov
Song Xiangpu
Tamas Nemeth
Zahra Mirzamomen

DCMTK forum users "nbeck", "pgimeno", "Martin Roeseler"

GitHub users "bettar", "Cheney-W", "chrisse74", "doskachok", "jogerh",
"knight2995", "kwach", "maddin200", "malaterre", "mrbean-bremen",
"reunanen", "StillerHarpo"

Members of the DCMTK Team who have worked on this release are:

Marco Eichelberg
Michael Onken
Joerg Riesmeier
Jan Schlamelcher

Student associates:

Marcel Baumann
Nikolas Goldhammer

The DCMTK software can be downloaded via:

https://dicom.offis.de/en/dcmtk/ or https://www.dcmtk.org/

OFFIS e.V., Oldenburg, Germany, 2023-12-19