Location of Pixel Data Tag in DICOM File

[chrisbll971]

Hello,

I was wondering if there is a way to find the exact index position of the pixel data within a DICOM file? For example, if the DICOM file is read into a Vec, the pixel data might start at the index 934 in the vector. Or alternatively, is there is a way to only read each frame into memory 1-by-1 vs. reading the entire pixel data into memory? The use case is we have some very large uncompressed files that we are trying to read and process (up to 80 GB+).

Thank you

[Enet4]

Thank you for bringing this up. Requiring objects to reside completely in memory is a known issue, but there are plans for an API which would enable reading bigger data sets in workable chunks.

Until then, the alternative available is to use the mid-level data set reader API in the dicom_parser crate. This API fetches DICOM data in tokens, and I believe would also let you peek the byte offset of the current position in the DICOM file. Working with this API will naturally be a bit trickier than the object API, but hopefully the next major versions will incorporate the aforementioned lazy/partial reading API.