how to create itk image from buffered dicom data

[mmeltsner]

hello,
i am currently able to nicely create itk images from dicom data by utilizing the gdcmimageio and the imagefilereader by reading a file from disk. However, i am writing an application in which the .dcm file is transmitted to me via binary data in a buffer over a network. Can anyone help me to figure out how to instead of forcing the imageio to read from disk to use the data already in memory? I couldn’t find a lot of clear answers on this anywhere and I don’t want to write the data from memory to disk and read it back in from disk as that is time consuming and not very elegant.
thanks,

[dzenanz (Dženan Zukić)]

Take a look at this post:

Reading/Writing Images to/from Memory (Rather than Files)

In 3D Slicer, we have a file-free ITK image IO plugin that we use to send/receive images in Slicer modules that are loaded as a dynamic library. You just register this plugin as any the other IO plugins. To pass an image to a module you don’t even need to write a file, just create a special filename (in our case it is slicer:<scene_memory_address>:<volume_node_id>) that the IO plugin recognizes and parses to get the memory address of the image. See source code of the IO plugin here and see how y…

[dzenanz (Dženan Zukić)]

I don’t think this will work for DICOM images. That is more of a question for GDCM project or DCMTK forum.

[zivy (Ziv Yaniv)]

As ITK IO is file oriented, possibly consider a RAM disk. It’s not an elegant solution as it still requires write/read, but it may be fast enough.

[zivy (Ziv Yaniv)]

For future reference: Added some code to this SimpleITK notebook illustrating this possible workaround in Python (setting up a RAM disk may not be critical if you have an NVMe drive).