dicom.el - DICOM viewer - Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine

DICOM stands for Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine. DICOM files are typically used for medical imaging with different modalities like US, CR, CT, MRI or PET. This package adds the ability to view such files in Emacs. The images and metadata are displayed in regular Emacs buffers. The package registers itself in auto-mode-alist and magic-mode-alist for DICOMDIR directory files and DICOM images (file extension *.dcm or *.ima). Furthermore the command dicom-open opens DICOMDIR directory files or DICOM image files interactively.

Installation

Dicom.el is available from GNU ELPA. You can install it directly via M-x package-install RET dicom RET. After installation, you can open DICOMDIR and DICOM image files.

Emacs must be compiled with support for PNG, SVG and XML. The package relies on external programs from the dcmtk DICOM toolkit, which are all widely available on Linux distributions.

• dcm2xml and dcmj2pnm from the dcmtk DICOM toolkit
• ffmpeg for video conversion (optional)
• mpv for video playing (optional)

Supported files

The DICOM format is quite diverse. Since dcm2xml tool from the DICOM toolkit is used to read the metadata, most uncorrupted DICOM files can be read. It can still happen that the DICOM viewer is unable to display files nicely, if the metadata records are not interpreted properly. Any help improving the package is welcome.

Contributions

Since this package is part of GNU ELPA contributions require a copyright assignment to the FSF.