I would love a small conversion tool to read in medical imaging dicom files and output a volumetric vdb dataset. I've nearly written this on several occasions. Most, but not all, dicom files encode a 2d or a 3d scalar field and vdb files are the graphical effects industry standard format for those, usually used for fog, fire, or similar effects. They can also usually be converted to polygon meshes through a variety of algorithms.
The reason why I want to do this is because 3d tools for artists -- blender, cinema 4d and the like -- have a large amount of easy-to-use and highly complex tools for subsetting volumes and making things look pretty.
Most medical imaging software is the opposite of this. You cannot change the data and the tooling is intentionally limited. Mostly this is a very good thing. Sometimes, however, and particularly for complex anatomy or pathology from a patient, you really just want to make a beautiful image for a paper with an anatomical structure manually removed, highlighted, or coloured differently -- something that would be very easy in e.g. Blender. The fact that Blender is python-scriptable is also frankly amazing and it's natively cross-platform too.
The reason I have written a tool like this is entirely because both file formats are very complex with lots of edge cases -- e.g. most ultrasound dicoms are little more then a screenshot with a lot of metadata, UI overlay and all. It's a lot of work and fundamentally isn't my job (I'm a medical physicist and should be making images with novel physics, not making images look pretty for presentation purposes).
Thanks! It seems like a very simple problem, is there a python library for vdb file IO? If so, I can probably whip something up (in python) with relative ease.
I work in the medical software field by the way. I know all about the pains of dicom...
The reason why I want to do this is because 3d tools for artists -- blender, cinema 4d and the like -- have a large amount of easy-to-use and highly complex tools for subsetting volumes and making things look pretty.
Most medical imaging software is the opposite of this. You cannot change the data and the tooling is intentionally limited. Mostly this is a very good thing. Sometimes, however, and particularly for complex anatomy or pathology from a patient, you really just want to make a beautiful image for a paper with an anatomical structure manually removed, highlighted, or coloured differently -- something that would be very easy in e.g. Blender. The fact that Blender is python-scriptable is also frankly amazing and it's natively cross-platform too.
The reason I have written a tool like this is entirely because both file formats are very complex with lots of edge cases -- e.g. most ultrasound dicoms are little more then a screenshot with a lot of metadata, UI overlay and all. It's a lot of work and fundamentally isn't my job (I'm a medical physicist and should be making images with novel physics, not making images look pretty for presentation purposes).