Support of M3D DICOM modality in QuantitativeReporting 3D Slicer extension

Hi everyone,

We are excited to announce the addition of M3D DICOM modality into the 3D Slicer QuantitativeReporting extension.

DICOM M3D is a somewhat unusual modality, which corresponds to DICOM Encapsulated STL. STL is a commonly used format for representing surface meshes. With DICOM M3D these commonly used surfaces can be included as DICOM series alongside image and segmentation series. The advantage of using DICOM M3D is that it includes metadata needed to associate your STL with the patient and DICOM study, will have unique identifiers, include references to the image it corresponds to, among other features.

With this new DICOM plugin users can import the DICOM M3D object into the database and load the DICOM object into the scene as a Slicer segmentation.

You can find samples of DICOM M3D in this new analysis results collection in NCI Imaging Data Commons: https://portal.imaging.datacommons.cancer.gov/explore/filters/?analysis_results_id=Prostate-MRI-US-Biopsy-DICOM-Annotations.
You can conveniently access the content of that collection using the SlicerIDCBrowser extension, as shown in the video below:

If you would like to learn how we converted STL into DICOM M3D, please check out this notebook: demo_conversion_stl_to_dicom.ipynb

Many thanks to @dclunie @pieper @lassoan @fedorov for their valuable advice and contributions to this module.

Feedback is always appreciated, please let us know what could be improved or modified about this module!

1 Like

Thanks Cosmin - since not many folks know about DICOM encapsulated STL files or have tools to use them, I posted a link to your excellent video in the DICOM WG 17 (3D and 3D printing) WG that added the M3D and STL and OBJ extensions to the DICOM standard in the first place … “https://forums.nema.org/t/how-to-open-dicom-encapsulated-stl-files-m3d-in-3d-slicer/71076” … you may need a NEMA login to gain access though (contact Shayna Knazik sknazik@dicomstandard.org if you want one).

2 Likes