Dear Debian-Med Team,

amide uses multiple external tools for importing data. In the Import
menu, there are multiple entries labeled "via (X)MedCon", but there's
neither a package relation with medcon nor with xmedcon.

The package requires libmdc2, which is the library provided by the
xmedcon project, so there is a relation.

Considering the suggestion of (x)medcon one might add that amide does
also not suggest dcmtk (another set of command line tools for
manipulating DICOM files) even though it also has dicom import by using
dcmtk.

Note that (x)medcon is amongst the packages that are  pulled in by the
Debian med the task package "med-imaging".


Best,
Gert

Hi Gerd,

thanks for the prompt feedback.

Gert Wollny wrote:

Ok, so I may have been a little bit quick with my conclusion.

I tried to import a file named "dicomdir" which I can view with other
DICOM viewers (namely invesalius and dicomimageviewer) by using File
-> Import File (specify) -> via "DICOM 3.0 via (X)MedCon" without
medcon or xmedcon installed. So I expected that the commandline tools
are required but missing.

The error message in the popup is:

  AMIDE WARNING

  Can't read file .../dicomdir with libmdc/(X)MedCon

The popup actually popped up twice. (BTW, it is very annoying that I
can not copy and paste from that error message. Especially if they're
longer as in the case with using the dcmtk backend, which throws
errors, but seems to work somehow in the end.)

On the commandline where I started amide, it shows the following messages,
but only once:

  Mar 04 12:29:49 log[31810]: error: No images found

  (amide:31810): (X)MedCon-WARNING **: Loading: DICM Error reading file

So I've installed xmedcon, opened that file with it and it gave me the
same error messages on the commandline:

  Mar 04 12:41:43 log[5807]: error: No images found

  (xmedcon:5807): (X)MedCon-WARNING **: Reading: DICM Error reading file

So it's either an issue with the medcon library or PEBKAC. I'm
reassiging this to the according library package.

Please feel free to close this bug report if libmdc2 is not expected
to handle dicomdir files (mine contains/references data from two
examinations).

amide as well as xmedcon seems to work well on single frames from an
X-Ray video in DICOM format, but I haven't found a way to view the
whole video with either of these tools.

Yes, I noticed that, too, but that worked (more or less) without dmctk
being installed. There's also a hard dependency on some dmctk library.
(I did recognize that one but not the medcon library, sorry.) So I
expected that the library suffices in that case.

Yeah, but IMHO that's irrelevant here. That task package pulls in tons
of packages I don't need. I just need an DICOM viewer.

		Regards, Axel

Hi,

I admit I do not fully understand all this but do you think that libmdc2
should depend from xmedcon to finally solve this issue?

Yes.

I'd love if some medical imaging expert would consider splitting up the
task into more sensible parts - but I'm no such expert ...

Kind regards

        Andreas.

Hi,

I just uploaded a new upstream version of xmedcon.  Could you please
verify whether the problem you reported persists in this version?

Kind regards

       Andreas.