I have a stack of axial dicom images, and I'm interested in displaying the saggital and coronal views. Because each dicom has a 'WindowCenter' and 'WindowWidth' tag, I want to know if there is any standard practice when it comes to using these values to display saggital and coronal views?
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DICOM Window Center (0028,1050) and Window Width (0028,1051) are part of the VOI LUT Module and are not related to positioning or geometry. Window Center (0028,1050) and Window Width (0028,1051) specify a linear conversion from stored pixel values (after any Modality LUT or Rescale Slope and Intercept specified in the IOD have been applied) to values to be displayed. Window Center contains the input value that is the center of the window. Window Width contains the width of the window. I.e. They provide the boundaries and slope of the lookup function and ultimately control the value displayed in your screen (grey value).
A wider window width will display a wider range of numbers. Consequently, the transition of dark to light structures will occur over a larger transition area to that of a narrow window width. The window center is the midpoint of the range of the numbers displayed. When the window center is decreased the image will be brighter and vice versa.
To display the sagittal and coronal views out of an axial series you will need to build a volume stack from the axial images using the tags in the Image Plane Module (Image Position (Patient), Image Orientation, Slice Thickness, etc.) (more complex in practice). Then use a reconstruction method such as Multi-Planar Reformat to render the sagittal and coronal views. Note that there are plenty of free/open source tools that can load DICOM images and do this for you.
bastijn
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