DICOM stands for Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine. DICOM files are
typically used for medical imaging with different modalities like US, CR, CT,
MRI or PET. This package adds the ability to view such files in Emacs. The
images and metadata are displayed in regular Emacs buffers. The package
registers itself in auto-mode-alist and magic-mode-alist for DICOMDIR directory
files and DICOM images (file extension *.dcm or *.ima). Furthermore the command
dicom-open opens DICOMDIR directory files or DICOM image files interactively.
Dicom.el is available on MELPA and can be installed via M-x package-install RET dicom RET.
After installation, you can open DICOMDIR and DICOM image files.
Emacs must be compiled with support for PNG, SVG and XML. The package relies on external programs from the DCMTK DICOM toolkit, which is widely available on Linux distributions.
dcm2xml and dcm2img from the DCMTK DICOM toolkit
magick from ImageMagick
ffmpeg for video conversion (optional)
mpv for video playing (optional)
The DICOM format is quite diverse. The dcm2xml tool can read the metadata of
most uncorrupted DICOM files. It can still happen that the DICOM viewer is
unable to display files, if the metadata records are not interpreted properly.
Furthermore the DICOM format supports a variety of underlying image formats and
compressions, which might not be supported by ImageMagick. In such cases, any
help improving the package is welcome.