Question

Greetings,

I am currently trying to learn some Java programming. To do this I’m trying to make something actually useful. Because I’m studying Medical Imaging, I though I would write my own Dicom Api in Java.

Part of the Dicom Standard is a Data Dictionary containing attributes used in Dicom Files. These attributes have to following properties.

(Group,Element) Description

For example:
(0x0002,0x0000) Length
(0x0002,0x0002) MediaStoredSOPClassUID
(0x0002,0x0010) TransferSyntaxUID
(0x0003,0x0003) Length

I was wondering how I should implement these in my API. The options I have thought of are:

• Enum, problem with that is that unique attributes could have the same description.


enum Attributes{
Length(0x0002,0x0000),
Length(0x0003,0x0000,
}


• A static class with just some constants containing the properties. Also the problem with the names excists.
• A xml file containing this data.

I really would like to use xml for this, because of the tabularity of the data and easy access. But is there any way I can include this in my Api.

~Timo Willemsen

Answer 1

a map will work best for you, define a class that will hold a dicom entry :

public class DicomEntry
{
private: 
    private string group;
    private string element;
    private string vr;
    private string name;

    public string  key() { return String.format("(%s,%s)",group,element); } 
}

also create a map that will hold all the entries

Map<string,DicomEntry> mp=new HashMap<string, DicomEntry>();

after reading each line from your dictionary file into an entry class object de add it the map

 mp.put(de.key(), de)

since the combination of group and element is unique you wound have any collisions