I am not much of a DICOM person, bit I have heard good things about DCMTK’s DICOM support. I am using DCMTKImageIO on a single file with the ImageFileReader. The MetaDataDictionary on the ImageIO, ImageFileReader, and the image are empty…
Does DCMTK expose DICOM tags in ITK?
No, the loading of metadata through DCMTK in ITK is broken, at least the last time I tried (~January), for the usual pipeline (reader + IO).
Inside the IO is used the DCMTKFileReader which is the actual class that fetch informations from DCMTK for the ITK image initialization, but field data are not passed upstream afterward. It’s merely a wrapper around a DcmFileformat/DcmDataset, and use quite the same semantic than DCMTK, which is … heavy. But yeah, DCMTK is very complete once you go with it.
So if you don’t want to invest time digging into DCMTK itself, using the reading pipeline with GDCM is far easier in my opinion.
HTH,
Tim