Whenever medical data, especially medical image data, is generated in a clinical environment, that data must be stored such that it can be retrieved by the same hospital either immediately, or after several years to determine the effectiveness of a course of treatment and to allow comparisons of multiple images for the same patient. Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) is a standard that governs this capability by specifying handling, storing, printing, and transmitting information in medical imaging. Grassroots DICOM (GDCM) is an implementation of the DICOM standard designed to be open source so that researchers may access clinical data directly. GDCM includes a file format definition and a network communications protocol, both of which should be extended to provide a full set of tools for a researcher or small medical imaging vendor to interface with an existing medical database.

Our code repository can be found here: http://code.google.com/p/google-summer-of-code-2011-gdcm/