Multidimensional data format specification: A generalization of the American College of Radiology-National Electric Manufacturers Association standards

Abstract

Multidimensional image data are becoming increasingly common in biomedical imaging. Three-dimensional visualization and analysis techniques based on three-dimensional image data have become an established discipline in biomedicine. Some imaging problems generate image data of even higher dimensions. It often becomes necessary, rather than just convenient, to consider the higher-dimensional data as a whole to adequately answer the underlying imaging questions. Despite this established need for convenient exchange of ima9e and image-derived information, no exchange protocols are available that adequately meet the needs of multidimensional imaging systems. This paper describes an exchange protocol that has been desi9ned after careful consideration of the common requirements of methodologies for visualization and analysis of multidimensional data. Ir is based on and is a generalization of the widely accepted American College of Radiology-National Electrical Manufacturers Association (ACR-NEMA) standards specified for two-dimensional images. It is implemented and actively being used in a data-, application-, and machine-independent software environment, being developed in the authors' department, for the visualization and analysis of muItidimensional images.

CAVASS: A Computer-Assisted Visualization and Analysis Software System

“…The data interface library in 3DVIEWNIX7,20 is designed for a data representation protocol, which is a generalization and an extension of the 2-dimensional DICOM standards. The data interface library contains functions for reading and writing the various types of data handled in 3DVIEWNIX.…”

“…It also incorporated a multidimensional generalization7 of the 2-dimensional digital imaging and communication in medicine (DICOM) image representation standards. This issue of the need to handle a multidimensional vectorial image as a single entity and also to handle nonimage structure information such as surfaces is only now being looked into by the standards committees related to DICOM.…”

Introducing CAVASS: a Computer-Assisted Visualization and Analysis Software System

“…The data interface library in 3DVIEWNIX [7,8] is designed for a data representation protocol which is a generalization and an extension of the 2D DICOM standards. The data interface library contains functions for reading and writing the various types of data handled in 3DVIEWNIX.…”

CAVASS: a framework for medical imaging applications

“…Based on our group's experience with the development of 3DVIEWNIX (and its progenitors, DISPLAY, DISPLAY82, 3D83, and 3D98), extremely efficient and often parallel implementations [17,19] of key operations have been implemented. In addition to the standard image file formats mentioned above, CAVASS can also directly read and write its native file format, IM0 [20,21], which is an n-dimensional extension to the DICOM format that was provided by 3DVIEWNIX. Tools for common image filtering operations such as Gaussian, median, diffusive, and morphological filtering are available as well.…”