Dependency library not recognized during installation octave forge dicom package in debian linux

问题

I ask this question on this stack exchange because it has (by far) the most posts about octave.

I started using a linux environment and want to use octave for my work, for which the dicom package is essential (my data is in the dicom format and not readily converted to nifti because of its high dimensionality, it would require many,many seperate files).

The dicom package is dependend on the gdcm library, which I have installed. The when installing the dicom package I get this error:

fatal error: gdcm-2.0/gdcmReader.h: No such file

The current gdcm version is newer than 2.0 so I thought maybe I should use the older version, but the error remained. Even the older function did not get installed to that path. I think the dicom package does not look at which path it should use.

Maybe this is a bug because the path is hardcoded (as suggested in the similar OSx thread) Maybe this happens because the last release is from 2011 and the package is just not maintained anymore, while gdcm keeps getting updates. Maybe Im just doing something horribly wrong that Im not seeing.