Converting Dicom (aka Medical) images

Today, I will explain how to convert a Dicom image (.dcm), which is a standard in medical imaging, to other formats (pgm/ppm, png, etc...). Usually MRI and such images are saved in this format.

There is a CLI tool to read&convert this kind of files, you can get it by running this in the Terminal (Ubuntu users):

sudo apt-get install dcmtk

You can then use these tools:

dcm2pnm
dcmj2pnm

I had to use dcmj2pnm, as dcm2pnm gave me errors (really depends on what kind of images you have).

Note* (in case of permission issues first copy the .dcm files to your disk, if they are on a CD issued by the doctor, and change permissions. A chmod 775 *.dcm run in the images dir will do the trick).

Run this command and it will convert the picture in a different format:

dcmj2pnm --all-frames input_image.dcm output_image

Enjoy!