In DICOM Search 1.3, we added the option to create a HTML slideshow from the images in your search results.  Click here to see a sample slideshow.

You need to first run a query to retrieve some images.  Let’s search for all MR images for the brain, from the sample images used by our tutorial.

This returns 13 images.

Let’s create a slideshow containing these 13 images.  Click on the Create HTML slideshow button.

This brings up the Create HTML Slideshow options.

The HTML file name is the name of the html file you want to create.  The Slideshow template file name is the slideshow template to use.  DICOM Search ships with 2 templates, which you can easily customize to your needs.

You can also resize the images to fit a specific width and height in pixels.  Additionally, you can also add a colored border around the image.  This is useful when you want to display information profiles in the images.

For this example, we will create a gray border of 360 pixels on the left, 80 pixels on the right, and 10 pixels for top and bottom.

On the next page, you can choose to embed DICOM tag values in your images using information profiles.  You can also set various attributes like margins and fonts.  Here, we’ll just select the Common details information profile.

DICOM Search then creates your slideshow.  When completed, click on the Open slideshow button.

Windows should then open the slideshow file in your browser.

Note the following:

• you can customize the slideshow templates to change the appearance
• the DICOM tag values from the selected information profile are embedded in the image
• the margins are used so that the tag values do not cover the image
• you can easily create information profiles that display a lot more information to be embedded in the slideshow images

DICOM Search is a Windows application and cannot run natively on Linux or MacOS.  Recently, we had a go at installing and running DICOM Search on Ubuntu 20.04.  We had it installed and running, but there were some issues with using the dark theme, some text were getting cropped, and the overall look was ugly (to put it mildly).

We have since resolved this, and you can now install and run DICOM Search on Ubuntu 20.04.  If you do encounter any issues or GUI abnormalities, please do drop us a line at support @yohz.com.

Here’s DICOM Search running on Ubuntu 20.04 via Wine:

(windows theme)

(dark theme)

We also tested DICOM Search on Elementary OS 5.1 and OpenSUSE 15.2.

(Elementary OS 5.1, dark theme)

(OpenSUSE 15.2, KDE Plasma desktop, dark theme)

If you do encounter any strange behavior when running DICOM Search on your Linux distribution, please do let us know at support@yohz.com.  Thank you.

Now, if only we had a Mac to test on…

Some DICOM tags store a numerical value along with some textual information.   This makes it difficult to search for a specific value using mathematical operators.

For e.g. the age tag [00101010] in my DICOM images store the patient age together with a prefix (0) and a suffix (Y) i.e.

If we want to search for images where the patient age is between 50 and 60, we would need to write our search query like this:

age IN (‘050Y’, ‘051Y’, ‘052Y’, ‘053Y’, ‘054Y’, ‘055Y’, ‘056Y’, ‘057Y’, ‘058Y’, ‘059Y’, ‘060Y’)

which is very tedious and error-prone.  In DICOM Search 1.2, we added the EXTRACTNUMBER and EXTRACTNUMBERDEF functions to deal with this issue.

EXTRACTNUMBER will extract the first sequence of digits from the tag value and return the number.  If there is no valid digits, the value 0 is returned.  We can then rewrite our search query this way:

EXTRACTNUMBER(age) >= 50 AND EXTRACTNUMBER(age) <= 60

or

EXTRACTNUMBER(age) > 49 AND EXTRACTNUMBER(age) < 61

or

EXTRACTNUMBER(age) IN (50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 59, 60)

The EXTRACTNUMBERDEF function accepts a 2nd parameter as the default value to use when no digits exist in the value.  If our search query was written this way:

EXTRACTNUMBERDEF(age, -1) = -1

then any images where the age tag value does not contain numbers will return the value -1, and we can then easily see which of our images does not contain a valid age value.