MicroDicom — A quick DICOM Viewer

As a student or researcher in the field of radiation medicine, have you ever received a medical dataset from the PACS system of a hospital and wondered how should I go about understanding all those DICOM files? Using MicroDicom, a lightweight viewer, one can easily understand the various DICOM tags and view the CT/MR/US scans with ease.

MicroDicom Viewer with its three main panes

Layout

The viewer contains three main windows — DICOM Browser, Image Viewer and the DICOM Tags Pane (from left to right)

Advantages

• Computationally light weight
• Fast loading of DICOM data
• DICOM Tag Browser — Compared to other viewers such as 3D Slicer, MeVisLab, MicroDicom has simple functionality to browse through the DICOM tags and their values. Thus, when writing code to parse through DICOM files, this can be helpful to find tags.

Disadvantages

• Unlike 3D Slicer, one cannot view medical volumes in 3D and neither can one see annotations from a DICOM file with annotations (e.g. Modality=’RTSTRUCT’)

Some Data Samples

• This Kaggle dataset (dicom_dir) can be simply drag and dropped into MicroDicom and one can view information such as PixelSpacing. It dataset only contains single images of the lung for each patient
• This dataset contains a full series of images for the abdomen. You can view a host of DICOM tags such as SliceThickness.

Hope this was a useful introduction to MicroDicom viewer!