Dicom Viewers: Series Merging for Enhanced Dicom Format

Hi All,

I am turning to the NeuroStars as I am having a bit of an issue when it comes to performing QC on multi-echo scans in the ENHANCED dicom format. The two dicom viewing software’s we use at my lab are Radi-Ant (for windows), and Horos (for Mac). Unfortunately, neither of these viewers seem to merge the series together in the current state the data is in. This makes it difficult to QC, because instead of scrolling through the whole series, you have to go through each volume one at a time.

I checked tags such as SeriesInstanceUID, and SeriesNumber, but they are the same between the volumes, and the series is still not merged. Does anyone have an idea of tags I can change to get these series to merge in the viewer? Or have any suggestions for an alternative viewer that will do this?

Any help is appreciated.

Thank you!

Daniel Balentine

You might want to try MRIcroGL or FSLeyes - both use dcm2niix to import DICOM images (and convert them to NIfTI). These tools are really designed for the simpler NIfTI format, so you may want to simply run dcm2niix from the command line to convert DICOM images to NIfTI. However, since these tools are ultimately designed for NIfTI, they may not integrate with a standard DICOM workflow.

Another useful visualization tool that handles many DICOM images is 3D Slicer

Enhanced DICOMs differ a lot between manufacturers (Philips, Siemens and Canon). In particular, Philips keeps a tremendous amount of redundant information in the header and can store multiple image types (e.g. real, imaginary, phase) in a single DICOM file. I would work with the manufacturer specialist associated with your center to optimize your usage of their images (for Siemens this is your Research Collaboration Manager, for Philips it is the Clinical Scientist).