How to read DICOM Image files in Java (Tutorial)

Bethan Palmer

2 years ago

Table of Contents show

1 Why do Dicom Images cause issues for Java Developers?

2 What options are there for reading Dicom files in Java?

3 How to upgrade ImageIO to read Dicom files

4 How to read a Dicom image in Java with JDeli

4.1 and the Java code to read DICOM with JDeli…

5 Other useful Dicom links

Why do Dicom Images cause issues for Java Developers?

Dicom is the standard for storing, transmitting and managing managing medical images across healthcare systems. It is an important part of enterprise imaging, the strategy to look after all imaging data across an organization.

ImageIO cannot read Dicom file types by default so existing Java Applications will not work with them. If you have an existing Java Application using ImageIO you will find it cannot process these images.

In this post, I will cover how to upgrade ImageIO to support Dicom files so existing Java Applications which use ImageIO will work (often without having to make any code changes) and how to read Dicom files in JDeli directly.

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What options are there for reading Dicom files in Java?

Java does not support DICOM images by default, so you’ll need an external library to work with them. Commercial libraries like JDeli add full DICOM support directly in Java, with no need for external plugins.

If you are looking for a free solution, there is Dicom support in the Twelve Monkeys ImageIO plugin. In this article we will be using our JDeli pure Java library to read Dicom files.

How to upgrade ImageIO to read Dicom files

It’s actually very simple and can be done without rewriting your existing code!

For example, the code below does not work with ImageIO for Dicom images


// Read Dicom image into Java with ImageIO

BufferedImage bufferedImage = ImageIO.read(new File("ImageFile.dcm"));

Steps to fix with JDeli:

Download the JDeli trial jar with our ImageIO plugin
Follow the support documentation to install

How to read a Dicom image in Java with JDeli

Add JDeli to your class or module path. (download the trial jar).
Create a File handle, InputStream pointing to the DICOM image. You can also use a byte[] containing the image data.
Read the DICOM image into a BufferedImage

and the Java code to read DICOM with JDeli…

File file = new File("/path/to/image.dcm"));

BufferedImage image = JDeli.read(file);