This command line tool allows to save a stl as DICOM.
Regarding BRP would it be important to export custom surgical guides, reconstruction or anatomical models on the Slicer scene not as stl but as DICOM?
I found this old presentation regarding this topic.
Yes, since encapsulated stl is part of the dicom standard it would be a good way to record the needed metadata about a model and store it in a hosptial pacs or vna. It also removes a lot of the ambiguity about coordinate systems and units that are problematic with native stl.
That said, it’s a somewhat obscure format so it’s not clear who else in the world would support that format.
It would be straightforward to implement a DICOM export plugin based on DCMTK’s stl2dcm example. However, I agree with @pieper in that this is a niche file format, therefore it is not clear if it is worth the effort of implementing and maintaining importers/exporters for it. I don’t think anyone form the Slicer developer team has ever seen such a DICOM file. It is also telling that DCMTK does not have a dcm2stl utility - most likely because people don’t come across such files.
Note that segmentations can also be stored in a mesh format, see: A.57Â Surface Segmentation IOD. It is a bit more general-purpose representation (not so tightly linked to 3D printing as the encapsulated STL), but it has not become widely used either. I only remember this single discussion on this forum about this information object: Load DICOM Surface Segmentation Objects
If you just need to store encapsulated data files on a PACS in DICOM format then you may also consider Slicer’s embedded MRML scene format (read/written by the “Slicer Data Bundle” plugin). It is not compatible with any other software, but it is already implemented and it works with all data objects that Slicer supports.