Difficulties with DICOM example and DCMTK

Getting Started
1

I’m having the exact same trouble as posted in this old SLAC hypernews link but there was no publicly available resolution to the reported problem. https://hypernews.slac.stanford.edu/HyperNews/geant4/get/medical_app/412/1/1.html

It seems to me to be a problem with building DCMTK from source. If I obtain DCMTK from my package manager (apt-get install dcmtk on Ubuntu 16.04) and inspect ‘1.dcm’ in the DICOM example using the ‘dcmdump’ executable, it will spit out correctly that the modality of the ‘1.dcm’ file is [CT]; however, it is my understanding I also need the shared libraries such that the GEANT DICOM example can compile correctly; thus the executables from package manager aren’t enough (am I wrong here?)

I tried building DCMTK from source (and tried both versions 3.6.2 and 3.6.5), make sure to enable ‘BUILD_SHARED_LIBS’ in the cmake config but both the DICOM example and ‘dcmdump’ when built from source will incorrectly identify the modality of the example ‘1.dcm’ file as [43] (amongst many other incorrect tags).

Anyone have an idea of what I’m doing wrong?
Thanks.

2

Hi David. Have you solved that? I have the same issue.

3

Better late than never…

I solved this by setting the environment variable DCMDICTPATH to the full path of the dicom.dic file(not just the directory) as explained here: https://forum.dcmtk.org/viewtopic.php?t=13. Following the steps of that old SLAC hypernews thread that you posted, I used the dcmdump like you but got the error “no data dictionary loaded, check environment variable: DCMDICTPATH”. Setting that in my .bashrc file fixed the issue.

And of course dcmtk has to be built with shared libraries and not static.

1 Like
4

Thank you! After hitting a dead end I didn’t follow up on this.