Jaymis on Create Digital Motion writes:
On Monday I had a CT scan. If you haven’t already, every visualist should go for a ride in a computed tomography machine. It’s the best mix of futuristic medicine and video geekness I’ve ever encountered. As happens with most medical imaging these days, I came away with both a collection of printed films and a CD full of images. However, unlike previous scans and xrays which were generally disparate grainy stills of amorphous organs or bones, these prints showed hundreds of clear, consecutive slices through my body.
Looking at the films I knew immediately that I should be able to use the frames to create an animation. Checking through the CD I found a folder of images named “CT000000″, “CT000001″ etc. Some quick googling informed me that these are DICOM format files, which contain both patient information and imagery.
Anyone on Windows who works with images should know the fantastic, free image viewer/toolkit Irfanview – it’s the VLC of the still-image world! Irfanview has a plugin in its default bundle which allows it to read and operate on DICOM files, as long as they have a .DCM extension. Fortunately Irfanview’s batch functions feature both Rename and Convert, so I was able to quickly go from the aforementioned folders of consecutively named, extensionless files; to folders filled with consecutively named .BMPs, which any visualist will recognize as a Good Thing.
I can’t wait to do this with my MRI images!
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