Grassroots DICOM

Web Page: http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/gdcm/index.php?title=GDCM_Summer_of_Code_2011

Mailing List: http://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/gdcm-developers

Whenever medical data, especially medical image data, is generated in a clinical environment, that data must be stored such that it can be retrieved by the same hospital either immediately, or after several years to determine the effectiveness of a course of treatment and to allow comparisons of multiple images for the same patient. Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) is a standard that governs this capability by specifying handling, storing, printing, and transmitting information in medical imaging. Grassroots DICOM (GDCM) is an implementation of the DICOM standard designed to be open source so that researchers may access clinical data directly. GDCM includes a file format definition and a network communications protocol, both of which should be extended to provide a full set of tools for a researcher or small medical imaging vendor to interface with an existing medical database.

Our code repository can be found here: http://code.google.com/p/google-summer-of-code-2011-gdcm/

Projects

• JPEG 2000 Interactive Protocol I have experience in working and handling with images (thesis + bachelor courses + individually projects) and also in compression (jpeg compression, algorithms like Huffman,LZW,LZ77 + networks application) so this will help me a lot in developing this type of project
• Whole Slide Imaging in Pathology DICOM currently defines Image IODs by storing the rows and columns as unsigned short integer. This means that an image can only be at most of size 2^16 * 2^16 pixels. This is a limitation for Microscopy Images as, for example, WSI can go up to Terabytes in extreme conditions.In addition to these “hard” restrictions, another consideration is due to large amount of information in these images rapid panning and zooming should also be supported.