孟祥溪
This is a review of DICOM viewer softwares that I use on my Windows 10 devices. Since I work with PET/CT and PET/MR images, this is from a perspective of a nuclear medical imaging researcher.
All are FLOSS unless otherwise mentioned.
MicroDicom is a light-weight visualizer of dicom images. It basically just show the image, plus a few essential functions, including window/level adjustment, and snapshot.
I usually use Microdicom if I just want to go through the images, or I use it to explore the values of the dicom tags. I can load the dicom folder, and scroll through multiple dicom files, while observing the values for certain dicom fields.
| 3D View | Multimodality | Segmentation | Specialty | Completeness | Functions | Convenience |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| No | No | No | Easy navigation, Dicom Tag |
4.0/5.0 | 3.0/5.0 | 5.0/5.0 |
itk-SNAP is a very popular software among researchers, and it is one of my favorite. It is widely used for manual segmentation of 3D images. It also has a function of auto segmentation, but I have never used it.
Apart from segmentation, itk-SNAP also provides users with other great features, including a registered multimodality display. It could also convert dicom files into other formats such as NIfTI.
There are also a few things that itk-SNAP could use some improvement. One thing is that, it cannot generate MIP images.
| 3D View | Multimodality | Segmentation | Specialty | Completeness | Functions | Convenience |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Yes | Yes | Yes | Segmentation | 4.5/5.0 | 4.5/5.0 | 4.5/5.0 |
MIPAV is a popular tool for multiple biomedical images, and it has rich functionalities including image processing, analysis and visualization. Developed by NIH, it has many great features.
However, I have not had a good experience with this Java-style software (which somehow reminds me of ImageJ). It seems that the product, so far, has not been optimized specifically for medical imaging.
| 3D View | Multimodality | Segmentation | Specialty | Completeness | Functions | Convenience |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Yes | ? | Basic | Multipurpose | 4.0/5.0 | 3.5/5.0 | 2.5/5.0 |
I used 3DSlicer to process my first MRI image of myself so I understand that it is a nice tool for some certain image processing tasks, especially for daily routine, or as a platform for development. However, for simply visualizing and analyzing multimodality imaging data, 3DSlicer seems to be redundant and clumsy. It takes a much longer time just to load the data, and I have not found an appropriate extension to effectively process PET/CT data. Maybe Slicer is just for MRI people.
| 3D View | Multimodality | Segmentation | Specialty | Completeness | Functions | Convenience |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Yes | Limited | Advanced | Advanced analysis | 4.5/5.0 | 4.5/5.0 | 2.0/5.0 |
Imager-4D is a software specifically designed to visualize and process dynamic PET data. It seems that the authors are very ambitious to make the software into a fully functional platform for dynamic PET. For example, they even included the function for radiomics feature extraction, but it seems not to be working.
However, the software is still in an infant stage, with many functions yet to be realized or optimized. It more seems like a beta version than a stable release. It has been time since the corresponding paper published, hopefully a second version will be out before long.
| 3D View | Multimodality | Segmentation | Specialty | Completeness | Functions | Convenience |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Yes | Yes | ROI/VOI | Dynamic PET | 2.5/5.0 | 3.5/5.0 | 4.0/5.0 |