Question

I have a final year project to develop a Mobile application that is able to view DICOM images and videos. The videos would be needed to be transferred using dynamic adaptive streaming over http.

I looked to developing the app using iOS but i had a issues importing DCMTK/ITK onto xCode as most guides were outdate.

I started looking at developing the application using HTML5/jQuery and Phonegap to deliver it cross platform.

My questions is how to take the approach in developing such app? I have not had much programming experience and have difficulty in finding an approach to this. I would like to store and retrieve the DICOM images/videos from DropBox or just somewhere in a server. I am not looking to have them for PACS server unless thats the only option as i do not have access to one.

Thank you in advance.

Answer 1

In order to display DICOM images in HTML5, you need to either:

1. convert them to JPEG or another web-compatible image format
2. write a DICOM parser in javascript w/ various image compression codecs to read raw DICOM and convert it into a format viewable on the web (say, for example, into 8 bit pixel values to insert into a canvas element)

the first one is much easier than the second. Let’s say that’s what you want to do. You will need a server that when asked for an image, would take the corresponding DICOM image and convert it into a JPEG, and then serve it to your client application, which will then display it.

You can use the WADO protocol and an open source PACS system (something like dcm4chee) to get JPEG versions of your DICOM files. WADO is a protocol used to provide Web Access to DICOM Objects, so all you have to do is request the right file, and the WADO-compatible server will be able to get you the JPEG you want.

There are then a lot of details to worry about, but, this should be enough to get you started.