As part of the LEAD Technologies 25th anniversary, we are creating 25 projects in 25 days to celebrate LEAD's depth of features and ease of use. Today's project comes from James.

What it Does

This project will monitor a folder and import DICOM files into a PACS Storage Server using LEADTOOLS Version 19.

As part of the LEAD Technologies 25th anniversary, we are creating 25 projects in 25 days to celebrate LEAD's depth of features and ease of use. Today's project comes from Joe.

What it Does

This project embeds PDF documents inside DICOM Data Sets using LEADTOOLS Version 19.

We love when developers give us feedback on our products. Feedback comes in many forms: tweets, emails, chats, feature requests, reviews, etc. Today, we're happy to share with you a review of our HTML5 Zero-Footprint Medical Viewer which is included in the Medical Imaging Suite SDK written by Jeremy Likness.

DICOM is the standard for storing and transmitting medical images. In the past, viewing DICOM was only possible with fat desktop clients that required local installation on specific hardware and platforms. LEADTOOLS, the leading provider of imaging SDKs, developed a zero-footprint DICOM viewer that can be used from any browser on any platform without installing plug-ins or local software. It is the perfect way to rapidly develop a medical imaging application that can be deployed to a centralized server and accessed from anywhere.

It's easy to take compression for granted with the availability of cheap storage. Many of the common file formats used in many applications are intrinsically compressed as well, like JPEGs and PNGs. However, when you get into the Medical Imaging market and the prevalent DICOM file format, it is a very different ballgame. Like any good preschooler, you might be asking, "Why?".

More often than not, DICOM files are loaded from a location on disk due to the size and complexity of the files. However, no environment and scenario is the same and we periodically get requests regarding how to load DICOM files from memory, more specifically a byte[] rather than a Stream. Due to the way that .NET garbage collection works we must use a .NET GCHandle object when passing an IntPtr to the overloaded DicomDataSet.Load function.

private byte[] loadedFile; // byte array for DICOM file from database, server, etc.
private DicomDataSet dicomDS;
private DicomElement element;

// Pin object so it is not garbage collected before work is done.
GCHandle gch = GCHandle.Alloc(loadedFile);

// Load DicomDS from byte[] using IntPtr of array.
dicomDS.Load(Marshal.UnsafeAddrOfPinnedArrayElement(loadedFile, 0),
   loadedFile.Length, DicomDataSetFlags.None);

// Unpin object.
gch.Free();

// Get image from DicomDS.
element = dicomDS.FindFirstElement(null, DicomTag.PixelData, true);
rasterImageViewer1.Image = dicomDS.GetImage(element, 0, 0,
   Leadtools.RasterByteOrder.Gray, DicomGetImageFlags.None);

To download the entire C# example project for versions 17.5 and 18, check out this forum post.