Is there any alternate way to processing DICOM images using WPF in C# without any third party/Library?

Question

I started working in a new project with a big challenge. I am working in a medical project and in that I have to read DICOM images and process the image with its properties. I gathered some basic knowledge on DICOM and PACS. As I worked on WPF around 2 years of my career so I choose to do this project using C# and WPF. I googled a lot and even I went through many articles in SO and also in codeproject, every where I found they used some libraries/ third party tools like:

gdcm , LEADTOOLS , ClearCanvas

Can any body suggest me any alternate way of doing DICOM Image processing without using any third party/library or is it impossible without using libraries/third party ?

I have gone through the link for choose a best suitable library for DICOM image processing, but looking for an alternate way to solving this.Please feel free to suggest which is the best and more flexible library from the above list only if there is not any alternate way to achieve the task.

Any idea, link, suggestion or any initiation will be appreciated, thanks in advance.

Answer 1

In one way or another the third-party libraries are also created from scratch, so of course it is possible to create a DICOM image processing solution without relying on any third-party libraries. Using whole or parts of an open-source library will most certainly take you to a functional solution in considerably shorter time, though.

One third-party library that is mentioned in the link you are referring to is mdcm. This is a relatively light-weight open-source library with support for WPF (and Silverlight). If you want to, I am pretty sure you should be able to extract those parts from this library that are relevant to your project.

Another light-weight library is Evil DICOM. I am not completely sure that this library has very much image processing functionality, though.

UPDATE MAY 31: SUMMARY OF DISCUSSION

mdcm is an open-source library under the LGPL license. An example of image rendering usage is given in the SL.DicomToXml (Silverlight) application, equally applicable to WPF applications. In the code-behind of the MainPage, fileNameButton_Click method, there is code to demonstrate DICOM image file loading and rendering.

There is currently no up-to-date binary distribution of mdcm available, but it should be fairly easy to build required libraries from the solution in the mdcm repository. Source code can either be obtained using a Git client or by downloading the latest revision by clicking on the ZIP button on the repository home page.

If you need to get more acquainted with DICOM image processing details, it is probably good to start by having a look at the DICOM Standard itself, and also to parse a DICOM image file to get the feeling for what information it contains. A good starting point is the official DICOM homepage. A quick introduction with links to software is given here. There is also a general, more lengthy tutorial available here.