In April 2000, a completely new concept has been introduced to the DICOM standard with Supplement 23: Structured Reporting (SR). Only a few month later, we started with the work on a new DCMTK module “dcmsr”. The intended purpose of this module was to support the DICOM viewer DICOMscope that was extended at that time to fulfill the requirements of the “DICOM Security Demonstration” sponsored by the NEMA Committee for the Advancement of DICOM and the DICOM Working Group 14 (Security).
Over the years, we further developed and enhanced the dcmsr module. New SR SOP Classes were added in the same manner as new value types (introduced with these new SOP classes). We also tried to follow the other (optional) extensions and clarifications to the standard. What is still missing is dedicated support for Templates and Context Groups, i.e. a machine-readable version of the numerous tables in DICOM Part 16 (Content Mapping Resource). There is currently also no assistance for validating an existing SR document against its templates or for creating a new SR document based on a given template.
Other than that, the DCMTK module “dcmsr” is a pretty complete and robust implementation of the DICOM Structured Reporting concepts. In fact, we have constantly enhanced the reading code in order to detect and report all the “curiosities” that can be found in both real-world and sample SR documents. In addition, SR documents can be created, modified, written and transformed into various formats like text, HTML and XHTML. There are also tools that convert SR documents from DICOM’s binary format to XML and vice versa. And, of course, all the functionality is not only available as command line tools but also on class level (C++).
We hope you enjoy the beauty of dcmsr 🙂