# DICOM Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine

Extensions: `.dcm`, `.ct`, `.mri`

A format for reading DICOM images: a common format used to store medical image data, such as X-ray, CT and MRI.

This format borrows some code (and ideas) from the pydicom project, and (to the best of our knowledge) has the same limitations as pydicom with regard to the type of files that it can handle. However, only a predefined subset of tags are extracted from the file. This allows for great simplifications allowing us to make a stand-alone reader, and also results in a much faster read time. We plan to allow reading all tags in the future (by using pydicom).

This format provides functionality to group images of the same series together, thus extracting volumes (and multiple volumes). Using volread will attempt to yield a volume. If multiple volumes are present, the first one is given. Using mimread will simply yield all images in the given directory (not taking series into account).

## Parameters for reading

progress : {True, False, BaseProgressIndicator}
  Whether to show progress when reading from multiple files. Default True. By passing an object that inherits from BaseProgressIndicator, the way in which progress is reported can be costumized.