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Working with DICOM data on images: OCR, save, and anonymize

Key Investigators

• Attila Nagy (University of Szeged, Hungary)
• Gábor Fichtinger (Queen's University, Kingston, ON, Canada)

Project Description

Sometimes CT or MR scans arrive as plain images (JPEG, PNG…), and the data is overlaid on them. The task is two-fold:

• get the data, because it may store spatial, series and patient information. This is an OCR task.
• get rid of the data, so it can be anonymized

Objective

Our goal was to create an extension prototype that can achieve the above goals, using pure Slicer and python infrastructure.

Approach and Plan

Work on prototype data, test various OCR solutions (Tesseract, EasyOCR), and implement the module with a GUI.

Progress and Next Steps

Module done. It is able to OCR text in selected ROIs, and then blank out those regions in all of the sliced (technically images). The modules support reviewing the OCR’ed data, saving it as JSON (and also save it in the scene MRML), and load it back. The regions can be blanked both with pure black (0,0,0) and pure white (255,255,255) RGB values. The DICOM functionality is not yet extensively tested, and there is also a placeholder where with the use of some regex DICOM data can automatically be imported into the series.

Illustrations

Here is a short video demonstrating the current functionality:

Background and References

No response