DICOM

DICOM (Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine) is a standard for handling, storing, printing, and transmitting information in medical imaging.

It works for local transaction, but for networking events also.

It includes a file format definition and a network communications protocol.

Ruby DICOM supports reading from, editing and writing to this file format.

It also features experimental support for network communication modalities like query, move, sending and receiving files.

What is new in this release:

• Fixed an issue where role negotiation in the network code would cause an exception.
• Fixed an issue where a C-Move request could terminate instead of properly waiting for a receipt.
• Fixed an issue where network code would hang waiting for a response when it doesn't get any.
• Automatically load RMagick/mini_magick when using the image methods, to avoid confusing exceptions.
• Made json and yaml gem dependencies, to avoid unexpected exceptions when using the #to_json and #to_yaml methods.
• Give a warning instead of raising an error when Parent#delete and #value gets an obviously invalid argument.
• Introduced Parent#representation, giving a description of the parent objects Sequence, Item & DObject.
• Refactored various methods for improved code simplicity.
• Upgraded specification to use RSpec 3.
• Changed information files from RDoc to Markdown format.
• Performance improvement when writing DICOM string segments.
• Changed element and uid dictionaries from .txt to .tsv.

What is new in version 0.9.5:

• Added DObject#anonymize for easy anonymization of a single DICOM object.
• Added add_element and add_sequence methods for conveniently creating new elements/sequences belonging to a specific DObject or Item.
• Fixed an issue where the NArray library where needed when trying to pass an array to the pixels= method.
• Fixed an issue where both Magick libraries where needed when trying to pass an image object to the image= method.
• Added DObject#was_dcm_on_input attribute to separate between file and DObject elements given to DICOM::load.
• Added option :include_empty_parents to DObject#write.
• Removed the deprecated DObjet#write :add_meta option.

What is new in version 0.9.3:

• Deprecated all #remove* methods (replaced with #delete*) to increase consistency with Ruby.
• Changed preferred DObject variable name from obj to dcm for all examples.
• Added comparison methods (#==, #eql? and #hash) as well as dynamic #to_* methods to DObject, Element, Item & Sequence classes.
• Fixed incorrect handling of 3D pixel data with NArray (regression introduced in v0.8).
• Anonymizer can take a list of tags to be entirely deleted from the DICOM files during anonymization.
• Added Accession Number to default list of tags that are anonymized.
• Added a generate_uid method for creating custom (but valid) UIDs.

What is new in version 0.7:

• Added set_image() and set_image_narray() methods to write pixel data to the DICOM object, complementing set_image_magick().
• Added method get_image() which retrieves pixel data to a standard Ruby Array.
• Added a method for removing all private data elements in the DICOM object.
• Anonymizer class has gained the ability to remove all private data elements when anonymizing.
• Fixed an issue where Anonymizer failed to anonymize tags which had multiple instances in a DICOM file.
• Fixed an issue where Anonymizer failed to honor an expception folder if it ended with a file separation character.
• Private data elements can now be added to a DICOM object.
• Created a new FileHandler class where the user can customize the way incoming DICOM files are handled in DServer.
• Methods set_image_narray() and set_image_magick() takes options :min and :max to rescale pixel values.
• The magick and narray image retrieval methods now takes the option :rescale to convert pixel values to presentation values.
• Method get_pos() now takes the option :parent to narrow a search down.
• Improved the set_value() method to handle the creation of data elements inside sequences/items.
• All DObject methods who return Data Element positions now return an empty array instead of false if no matches are found.
• Improved handling of private tags in the library.
• Network transmissions with implicit encoding are now handled properly.
• Improved the handling of associations in the networking code.
• Some minor formatting improvements to the print() method.
• Improve the logic of updating group/sequence/item lengths to handle changes to Data Elements in sequence hierarchies.
• DLibrary class is permanently loaded when the gem is loaded and no longer needs to be specified by the user.
• Method get_image_magick() now handles pixel representation and window leveling.
• Program files was moved to a sub-directory and a module version string added, in accordance with gem guidelines.
• Renamed DObject attribute :types to :vr in accordance with the terminology of the official DICOM standard.
• Renamed method get_raw() to get_bin() and attribute :raw to :bin.
• Renamed get_pos() option :array to :selection.
• Updated Dictionary in accordance with the 2009 version of the official DICOM base standard.
• Various "under the hood" improvements and code cleanups.