It happened! What happened Dave? Something Wonderful!
As of July 28th, 2008, Ruby gets a DICOM library. A straight up pure Ruby implementation with no external dependencies. Thanks to the hard work of Christoffer Lervag I can re-think my use of jruby and iterate all over dicom headers like Chewie rips out a hyper drive… all with ruby sweetness like Yukihiro Matsumoto intended.
Ok, so I have a half ass blog post on possibly the coolest 10 method ruby library since Warnock’s GapMinder plug-in lowered my productivity for an evening, but I have to apologize… this gift fell from the sky, and I have only been able to play with 2 methods (of 10) so far, so bear with it as I hack through it over the next few days.
Though the library in its 2 day infancy only supports file level I/O, I already have to say that Mirth may already be replaced when it comes to databasing dicom values … I think a marriage of this library and active-record are in short order, check a full header dump below.
Although I have a basic love/hate with Rmagick, check out this ImageMagick launch with the pixel data of the first slice! cool eh? This library will build each slice into an array, send the object the .display message and view… better than a viewmaster.
Stay Tuned, and thanks Christoffer!