Saturday 8 January 2011

Almost useful

A milestone has been reached! A (single frame, non-JPEG) image now displays in the UI. OK, so it only really works for images whose dynamic range doesn't overflow the pixel intensity and cause sharp white-black transitions and there's no interpolation of the image to fit the display or scaling of pixel intensities to fit the width and centre but it's on the screen damnit :P

Intensity scaling and multiframe I can see how to do. Interpolation is simple in theory but the bugbear is going to be JPEG. I'm pushing that squarely onto the back burner for now as the only data I've seen with JPEG encoding is the Osirix example stuff. For now I'm pleased that I can build Hastur/DicomH on my work computer and actually have something that's useful. Admittedly it's more useful for looking at the raw data than the images right now but I've not seen any other program that allows me to look at the raw so easily, free or otherwise.

Proof is what we like so it's time to pony up the screenie... You can see the white-black wrapping issue clearly in the CSF and the skin.

Big steps forward since last time:
  • Study (patient) list now reacts to item selection by populating the series list
  • Series list reacts to item selection by putting the images for the series into the right hand panel
  • The slider below the right hand panel allows the user to move through the images in the series

Two immediate problems I need to fix. The current SOP instance is rendered to text on the "Raw" tab no matter if the tab is visible or not. Since this is primarily concatenating immutable strings to produce new immutable strings, this is rather expensive in terms of repeated memory allocation and garbage collection. This is fixable as soon as I can figure out which events to intercept on which windows. The second one is rather nastier. Trying to render certain images causes the stack to grow beyond 8MB. I suspect a space leak from incorrect processing of the pixel list. Fixing this may involve a fold, in my imperative mind one of the darker and more mysterious parts of Haskell along with monads.

There's so much yet to do. How quickly it gets done depends on how good I am at resisting the draw of Lord of the Rings Online :P