# About Sdr2

Bookmarks:
- Background
- Development
- History
- Dependencies
- Incorporated Software

### Background

Until the beginning of the 1980s medical scanners generated slice data in proprietary i.e. vendor specific formats. It was the merit of the American College of Radiology (ACR) and the National Electrical Manufacturers Association (NEMA) to develop and promote standards for medical images and communication systems. In 1993 these efforts led to the Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) standard. DICOM is very complex and still leaves room to vendor specific data elements.

Volumetric medical imaging depends on error-free oriented and scaled voxel data sets. To facilitate the generation and handling of medical volumetric data sets, data formats specifical suited for this task have evolved.
The Mayo Analyze 7.5 file format has been widely used in the this field. Some groups felt that Analyze might fall short on providing proper patient orientation attributes and limited basic data types. Additions to the Analyze 7.5 file format resulted in the NIfTI (Neuroimaging Informatics Technology Initiative) format.
A crucial step in volumetric medical imaging is to convert slice data from DICOM image series to voxel data sets. Sdr2 is yet another DICOM to NIfTI converter.

### Development

Sdr2 is a moonlight project of Johannes A. Koeppen in cooperation with the deep brain stimulation group at the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf (UKE, Germany). Several doctoral fellows contributed to Sdr2 by applying and testing it in their projects. Sdr2 is written in C and C++.

### History

Sdr2 is the successor of Sdr(1). Sdr(1) was a humble effort to generate isometric volume files for Ogles(1). Sdr(1) is dicontinued.

### Dependencies

Sdr2 GUI is Qt (Release 4.8.x), Community license (GPL 3 or LGPL 2.1).
Reading of DICOM images is done by the DCMTK library as a backend.
Please see Copyright of DCMTK and refer to Install for compilation of Sdr2.

### Incorporated Software

Besides DCMTK the second pillar of Sdr2 are Jeroen van der Waal's QT Dicom widgets. (LGPLv2.1) Sdr2's third pillar is NIfTI/niftilib (public domain). Basic linear algebra is calculated in some classes from Coin3d (BSD 3 license).