Saving an image

The following steps assume that at least one DICOM image has been loaded.

Determine which format you want to use for storage

Images can be stored in different formats. The different formats differ with regards to the amount of meta information they contain (information about the patient, camera, etc), and how much information they contain about each pixel in the image. Initially, when a camera takes an image, 12-32 bits of information are used to store the counts per pixel, and no meta data is included. This format is known as RAW. Metadata can be added to a RAW image, and nordicICE supports storage in the DICOM and SPM/Analyze formats. Alternatively, one can reduce the amount of information per pixel by using such formats as TIFF and BMP. Both these formats reproduce an image as it is displayed on a computer screen, (i.e 8 bits per color.) Further compression of an image is possible by using a compression algorithm. nordicICE supports the JPEG format which compresses an image, but looses even further image information. (i.e on a computer screen a JPEG image can be different from the original image)
You should consider:

Do you need or want the meta information?
Do you need all the information per pixel? If not, how much can you loose? If you are going to display the image on a web page, you can loose a lot. If you are going to use the image for further processing, you should probably keep as much information as possible. An image with less information per pixel uses less storage space.
Is the image gong to be used by an application that only accepts certain image formats? This can restrict you options considerably. E.g Microsoft Word does not accept images in the DICOM format.
Do you want to display the image in a special way, such as a movie?

Determine where to store your image

You should consider some things before storing your images.

Do you need a backup taken of the images?
Do you want to make your images available to others by using a shared folder or dirve?
Do you have write permissions to the folder you intend to use? If not, choose a different folder, or get the necessary permissions. You normally have write permissions in the My Documents folder.
If you are storing to a local disk, how are you going to organize your documents so that you can easily retrieve them later?

For the sake of this tutorial, use the My Documents\My Pictures folder, unless you know that you have write permissions in a different folder, and wish to use it.

Anonymising an image and editing the image header

Before making an image with metadata available to an audience, you should probably remove information that can identify the person imaged. This is easily done in nordicICE.

1. In the Main menu, select the Modify menu and the Image Header Edit... menu item.

2. In the Dicom Edit dialog, press the Anonymize header button.

3. Perform any changes you want to in the text fields. (Perhaps you should change Image comments?)

4. Click OK.

Saving a single image

This example will show you how to save the current image in the DICOM format. Please note, to store in the DICOM format, the image should have been loaded into nordicICE as a DICOM image, since nordicICE does not support adding DICOM information to an image.

1. In the Main menu, select the File menu and the Save... menu item

2. In the Save dialog, select the Current image radio button.

3. Click Save

4. In the Save current image dialog select the folder you want to use to save the image to.

5. In the File name: text field, enter the file name you want to use.

6. In the Save as type: text field, select DICOM (.dcm) from the drop-down list

7. Click Save

The Series number has to be changed, to distinguish the saved image from the images already saved on disk. Note that this will also change the series date in the DICOM information

1. In the Create new DICOM series dialog change the New Series Number to 11 (or a different unused number).

2. Click OK

Alternatives:

Documents can also be stored in the nordicICE DICOM database