Wednesday, June 22, 2005

More recipes (evidence-based) and DICOM

Finally, the British Medical Journal (BMJ) has released the results of the “polymeal” competition. You can find all recipes on bmj.com. From the winner recipe (submitted by Heather Haywood) I particularly liked the fondue. I am going to try the other ones as well (albeit with some minor modifications), and perhaps let you know the results.
During the past couple of months I have been doing many things, one of which was to try and implement DICOM network communication between my cephalometric software and a DICOM server. I must say that this is a very frustrating endeavour because the DICOM information manual (published by NEMA - National Electrical Manufacturers Association, medical.nema.org) is very difficult to read and understand. I got a lot of help from looking at the source code provided by the DCMTK software package and using the Conquest software as a testing bed. While I was doing all this, I was thinking about writing a do-it-yourself guide for all those who may need to do the same, but I am afraid that there is no free time. However, I am planning to release the source code, when it is done. Currently I am at the stage where the client communicates with the server and gets info about what images are available. The next step (which shouldn’t be that difficult) is to actually transfer the image from the server to the client.