Gdcm Home Page

Note for Google users :
If you don't see in the left part of your screen the blue 'side bar',
starting with 'News', 'Licence', 'Documentation', 'Download', etc better click on :
http://www.creatis.insa-lyon.fr/software/public/Gdcm/

(Important note for ITK users)

ITK (Insight ToolKit) still uses by default gdcm 1.2.x, but can be used with a system installed gdcm 2.x
Current gdcm 1.x version is 1.3.x

(Important note for new DICOM users)

An other version, called gdcm2 exists, an is a complete ground up rewrite of GDCM 1.x. (have a look at http://apps.sourceforge.net/mediawiki/gdcm/index.php?title=GDCM_Release_2.0 )
If you are a new DICOM user, better use gdcm2, because its structure will allow much more features than gdcm1.x does (it's almost exclusively 'image oriented'). gdcm2 is wrapped in python, C# and Java.

Gdcm is yet another C++ library dedicated to reading/parsing and writing Dicom medical files.
GDCM stands as a short for "Grass roots DiCoM.

What gdcm IS

gdcm implements the dicom base standard part 5 that concentrates on image file format. Hence gdcm supports the following formats:
- ACR-NEMA version 1 and 2
- Dicom version 3.0 (including various encodings of JPEG -lossless and lossy-, RLE). Please refer to gdcm conformance summary for more details.
- Papyrus V2 and V3 file headers are readable; the user will have to use low level accessors if he wants to get the image pixels -sorry-.
gdcm includes a lot of heuristics that allow reading all the 'exotic' files (headers with oddities) we had to deal with.
Any king of 'exotic' Dicom file is welcome, to help us to improve our library.
gdcm is distributed with Berkeley-like license.
gdcm is cross platform (it compiles with gcc 2.95, 2.96, 3.0.x, 3.2.x, 3.3.x, 3.4.x, 4.0.x, 4.1.x , icc , cc (SunOS), VisualC++, Borland, nmake... )
gdcm has a nightly Dashboard (the whole lib is checked every night)
gdcm targets both GNU/Un*ces and Windows/VC++ (refer to requirements for details).
gdcm comes with a VTK shallow wrapper class vtkGdcmReader (refer to VtkGdcm) to ease the burden of VTK users,
gdcm also comes with gdcmPython it's SWIG generated Python wrappers.

What gdcm is NOT

Except for dicom base standard part 5 gdcm does NOT implement any other part of the Dicom base standard (as opposed to other C++ based with open license libraries like DCMTK or CTN).
In particular gdcm is not aware of:

the Dicom network file exchange protocol (Query/Retrieve),
the Dicom media storage formats (well ... it knows about the DICOMDIR -reading and writing- and its parts PATIENT, STUDY, SERIES, IMAGE)
Print, Verification
ANY OTHER PART of Dicom.

What gdcm still misses

Among all the features of the dicom part 5 gdcm doesn't implement (yet?)

the integration of (optional) overlays on image.
...

Gdcm also still needs

an enhanced and simpler API to access the various forms of pixel data (e.g. RGB, GrayLevel, RawData...),
a decent user's guide (currently, only a partial doxygenation is available),
the python wrappers to be fixed,
a simple wxWidgets Dicom file editor.