I am trying to extract a patient’s left ventricle geometry from 3D TEE using the GE Vivid E95. I have been trying to use 3DSlicer with SlicerHeart but am having some issues importing the DICOM files I received from the hospital we are working with. Is there a specific procedure for how the data should be exported from the machine to be able to be used in 3DSlicer and SlicerHeart? I am wondering if they saved it in some weird way and that’s why I am having issues. See attached for what it looks like after I go to “load data” and then choose a file to import (not sure why the colors are so weird and not in black/white!). Also, when I try to do “load DICOM” instead of “load data”, it gives me an error saying it cannot load: unnamed series as a scalar volume.
So is the issue that I’m just not importing the data correctly or do the files I have not actually contain 3D echo data? We asked the hospital for an example of 3D echo of a pediatric heart and this is what they sent us - see below file.
This file does not seem to contain 3D information, it is just a screen capture of a replayed 3D acquisition. It shows up nicely in recent Slicer Preview Release, but it is not usable for much, other than just viewing:
Above answer is, of course, absolute correct. Just for completeness and to advocate a little Ultrasound Multi-frame Image Storage IOD, there are also 2 calibrated regions (green at the screenshot below) for measurement and cine module to view 2D+t animation correctly. Both are seldom supported by viewers. Good news are that YBR_FULL_422 fix is here now (correct colors)
It would be easy to load calibrated regions as multivolume (so that it can be played as a cine acquisition) and applying spacing. We haven’t worked on this because nobody has requested this feature.
Probably the reason is that 2D ultrasound image frames usually come without position/orientation information and covered with burnt-in annotations, so even the calibrated regions are not usable for anything else than simple 2D measurements. However, these simple 2D measurements can be easily doable in any software, including software running on the ultrasound cart, so people don’t use Slicer for this.
The situation is similar for XA image sequences - it would be very easy to add support for them in Slicer, but we haven’t heard from anyone who would need it.
