[Neuroimaging] JSON-LD and DICOM?

[Christopher Markiewicz]

Andrey,

The ascription of metadata as "belonging to DICOM" seems restrictive to no
particular purpose but to promote the adoption of the DICOM format. Given
that people *do* convert DICOM to NIfTI, and want to keep the metadata
around, is there a technical reason that DICOM attributes shouldn't be used?

To be clear, I have nothing against DICOM, but the *vast* majority of data
I see is NIfTI, and NIfTI is probably the most consistently supported
format in the software packages I've seen. And preserving metadata through
analysis steps is a problem. Storing DICOM attributes in the NIfTI header
seems like a reasonable way to both preserve metadata in-band and avoid
inventing a new ontology that then needs to have a mapping to DICOM's.

As an aside, the aim of dcmqi seems to be to encourage people to convert
their results to DICOM, and a feature that allows DICOM attributes to be
maintained during analyses that expect data in NIfTI strikes me as, if
anything, supportive of that goal.

Chris


On Fri, Jun 30, 2017 at 11:53 AM, Andrey Fedorov <andrey.fedorov at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Matthew,
>
> I believe that image data and derived data belongs to DICOM, and DICOM
> is the format that should be used directly.
>
> We applied these ideas and demonstrated some capabilities here
> https://peerj.com/articles/2057/, and we continue the development of
> supporting tools in DCMTK and in https://github.com/qiicr/dcmqi.
>
> Perhaps if you give me some specifics about "why not DICOM", we could
> have a bit more focused conversation.
>
> I do realize and anticipate that you will take this as a complete heresy.
>
> AF
>
>
>
> On Fri, Jun 30, 2017 at 9:32 AM, Matthew Brett <matthew.brett at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > On Fri, Jun 30, 2017 at 2:25 PM, Andrey Fedorov
> > <andrey.fedorov at gmail.com> wrote:
> >> Hi guys,
> >>
> >> no, I don't think that file will be useful to you.
> >>
> >> For us, the plan was to utilize that file as a central location to
> >> link to the DICOM standard text and attribute definitions, but it has
> >> not yet become a priority to organize this. We are focused on the
> >> functionality and bug fixes for the library.
> >>
> >> If you come up with something, I would be curious to see, although I
> >> don't think that copying DICOM attributes to a NIfTI header is a good
> >> idea.
> >
> > That's interesting - why do you not think it's a good idea?
> >
> > Best,
> >
> > Matthew
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