Usage

The DICOM images require a lot of information which is not contained in a flat PNG or JPEG image. This information would, in a production environment, usually come from the practice management software, or photo management software.

CLI

The current way to feed this information to dicom4ortho’s CLI is using a CSV file. You can find an example CSV file here

Once installed, use dicom4ortho like this:

$ dicom4ortho <filename>

Where filename should be a .csv file. Passing a single image file with metadata through arguments is planned for future implementations.

Using the library directly

Latest example of usage can be found in the fhir2dicome4ortho.tasks module. Also look at the main entrypoint for dicom4ortho.

Updating terminology codes

The DICOM codes and orthodontic view definitions used by dicom4ortho are baked in at build time as a generated Python module (dicom4ortho/_generated_codes.py). This is intentional: it acts as a lock file that pins the exact terminology used in a release, ensures reproducible builds, and means end users never need network access at runtime.

To update the codes (e.g. when DICOM publishes new CID tables or dent-oip updates its view definitions), run the following from the repository root:

$ make update_resources

This will:

  1. Download the latest codes.csv and views.csv from the dent-oip repository.

  2. Regenerate dicom4ortho/_generated_codes.py from those sources.

  3. Commit the updated files.

The sources for the codes are:

  • View layout (which codes apply to each of the 73 orthodontic views): dent-oip repository on GitHub (https://raw.githubusercontent.com/open-ortho/dent-oip/latest/source/tables/)

  • DICOM CID codes (CID 4061–4072, added by CP-1570): published by DICOM as FHIR ValueSets at ftp://medical.nema.org/medical/dicom/resources/valuesets/fhir/json/

  • Orthodontic SNOMED codes: terminology.open-ortho.org