A database paradigm for the management of DICOM-RT structure sets using a geographic information system

Weber Shao,Daniel A Low,Patrick A Kupelian,Jason Wang,Dan Ruan

doi:10.1088/1742-6596/489/1/012097

Weber Shao, Daniel A Low + Show 3 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1088/1742-6596/489/1/012097

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Abstract

We devise a paradigm for representing the DICOM-RT structure sets in a database management system, in such way that secondary calculations of geometric information can be performed quickly from the existing contour definitions. The implementation of this paradigm is achieved using the PostgreSQL database system and the PostGIS extension, a geographic information system commonly used for encoding geographical map data. The proposed paradigm eliminates the overhead of retrieving large data records from the database, as well as the need to implement various numerical and data parsing routines, when additional information related to the geometry of the anatomy is desired.

Highlights

DICOM-RT, a widely utilized extension to the Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) imaging standard, represents many aspects of radiotherapy imaging
It is desirable to devise a paradigm for representing the RT structure sets in the database management system, in such way that secondary calculations of geometric information can be performed quickly from the existing RT contour definitions
For Approach 1, we will invoke several PostGIS API functions to carry out the computation of twodimensional geometric measurements as SQL columns, which is used with aggregate functions, and if necessary, nested queries, to calculate the quantities interest: surface area, volume, and geometric centroid

Summary

Introduction

DICOM-RT, a widely utilized extension to the Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) imaging standard, represents many aspects of radiotherapy imaging. One of such is the RT structure sets, a group of definitions of anatomical regions of interest. One approach is to rely on clientside processing after record retrieval from the database. Using this method, client-side computation can be carried out swiftly if the routine is implemented using a compiled language such as C, at the expense of having to handle memory management. A bigger drawback of this approach is the relatively long data retrieval time due to the size of the collection of RT contour records

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