Import echocardiography and MRI DICOM images

[Mandar Kulkarni]

Hello all,

Does anyone know how I can import echocardiography images into SimVascular to create a model, mesh, run a simulation etc?

I have a very hundreds of of images currently in JPG format. There is also a DICOM image viewer which allows me to view a video of the echo exam (the images are played in succession at a certain speed). There seem to be several JPG to DICOM conversion software but I am not sure which one might be useful for the purpose of getting the images in the right format so that I can input them into SimVascular.

I have a similar situation with MRI data, which might probably be more useful than the echo data. But again, not sure how to import it into SimVascular.

Any suggestions or ideas are most welcome.

Thanks,
Mandar

[David Parker]

Hi Mandar,

If you can convert the images to DICOM format then you might be able to read them in to SV. However, you might have a problem if you don't include all of the DICOM tags required by the SV DICOM reader.

You could also try to convert the images into a VTK VTI format.

Cheers,
Dave

[Mandar Kulkarni]

Hi Dave,

That helps!

Where can I get information about the tags requires by the SV DICOM reader?

Thanks,
Mandar

[David Parker]

Hi Mandar,

I'm not exactly sure which tags need to be in the DICOM files, there is no guidance on this from MITK, the software framework we use to read DICOM files. At the very least you will need to include tags used to specify the image plane

• Slice Thickness

• Image Position

• Slice Location

• Pixel Spacing

The DICOM reader may require that all the tags be defined!

It might be easier to create a VTI file, just need to set pixel spacing and origin I think.

Cheers,
Dave