Pydicom, a python package to work with DICOM files

I recently had the chance to work on a project that involved dealing with DICOM files. For this project, I basically had to write a parser that would extract and store all the available information about patients, tests perform on them, and visual and/or audio data embedded in the DICOMs.

As I was researching to try to find a good tool or library that would help me parse DICOM files, I came across Pydicom.

Pydicom is an open source library written in python than can create, parse and alter DICOM files. After 11 years of work, the team recently released version 1.3.0, with some good additions and bug fixes. The project was conceived as pure python package that will run on any machine that can run python, It relies on very few packages, making a very easy package to install and start using right away. Its very detailed documentation makes the learning curve very smooth, and its very active community is very responsive and will try to help as much as they can.

There are other options out there to work with DICOM files like GCDM or DCMTK, but if you want to avoid potentially complicated installation processes, and you're not concerned about the slow performance of interpreted langauges, Pydicom is probably the best solution out there for projects that need to work with DICOM files.

Pydicom GitHub