Previously I’ve written my own R code to access DICOM-RT structure sets in group 3006 of the meta-data. Shortly after I wrote that original post, Reid F. Thompson made his R package RadOnc available on CRAN. Unfortunately, my old code no longer works with the current version of the oro.dicom R package, therefore I would recommend using RadOnc instead. The code below is focused on importing the 3D geometry, but the R package has a lot of other features that you might find useful: for example, calculation of Dice similarity coefficient and Hausdorff distance; as well as import of dose-volume histograms (DVH).

The example DICOM-RT image used in this code is available from here. The code runs fine on Windows, but in order to run it on OS X you will need to install an X-Windows server such as XQuartz. I’m currently running Mac OS 10.9.5 (Mavericks) with XQuartz 2.7.11. You will require administrator privileges to install this on your Mac. If you get an error message about /opt/X11/lib/libGLU.1.dylib , that will be why.

library(rgl) library(RadOnc)

## Loading required package: geometry ## Loading required package: magic ## Loading required package: abind ## Loading required package: oro.dicom ## ## oro.dicom: Rigorous - DICOM Input / Output (version = 0.5.0) ## Loading required package: ptinpoly ## Loading required package: misc3d

rtstruct <- read.DICOM.RT(path="~/Downloads/ITK4SampleDCMRT/", modality="MR", verbose=TRUE, DVH=FALSE, modality="MR")

## Reading 61 DICOM files from path: '~/Downloads/ITK4SampleDCMRT/' ... FINISHED ## Extracting MR data ... FINISHED [60 slices, 1.5x1.5x3.0mm res] ## Warning in read.DICOM.RT(path = "~/Downloads/ITK4SampleDCMRT/", verbose = ## TRUE, : Unable to extract DVH data from DICOM-RT (no dose grid available) ## Reading structure set from file: '/Users/stsrjs/Downloads/ITK4SampleDCMRT//RS.1.2.246.352.71.4.886768594.5257.20090622110825.dcm' ... (7 structures identified) ## Warning in read.DICOM.RT(path = "~/Downloads/ITK4SampleDCMRT/", verbose = ## TRUE, : Structure(s) 'GS1', 'GS2', 'GS3' are empty ## FINISHED ## Processing (7) structures: ## JP: GS1 [EMPTY] ... FINISHED ## JP: MRI_RECTUM_RT [32 axial slice(s), 5784 point(s)] ... FINISHED ## JP: MRI_BONEOUTER_RT [182 axial slice(s), 77052 point(s)] ... FINISHED ## JP: GS2 [EMPTY] ... FINISHED ## JP: GS3 [EMPTY] ... FINISHED ## JP: MRI_BLADDER_RT [23 axial slice(s), 11058 point(s)] ... FINISHED ## JP: MRI_PROSTATE_RO [12 axial slice(s), 3024 point(s)] ... FINISHED

print(rtstruct)

## [1] "RT data '~/Downloads/ITK4SampleDCMRT/' containing CT image (256x256x60), 7 structure(s)"

print(rtstruct$structures)

## [1] "List containing 7 structure3D objects (GS1 JP, MRI_RECTUM_RT JP, MRI_BONEOUTER_RT JP, GS2 JP, GS3 JP, MRI_BLADDER_RT JP, MRI_PROSTATE_RO JP)"

plot(rtstruct$structures[[3]])

The interactive 3D visualisation using rgl is very nice, but it would also be helpful to be able to scroll through the axial slices one at a time. For example, see my earlier post about misc3d:

library(tkrplot)

## Loading required package: tcltk

slices3d(rtstruct$CT)

## <environment: 0x7fa20396f898>



The slices3d function does support overlays, so this seems like it would be fairly straightforward to do.

The following code demonstrates how to calculate the Hausdorff distance between the bladder and prostate and plot a visualisation of the contours:

compareStructures(rtstruct$structures[c(6,7)], method="hausdorff", hausdorff.method="mean")

## Analyzing structure 1/2 (MRI_BLADDER_RT JP) ... ## FINISHED ## Analyzing structure 2/2 (MRI_PROSTATE_RO JP) ... FINISHED ## MRI_BLADDER_RT JP MRI_PROSTATE_RO JP ## MRI_BLADDER_RT JP 0.00000 29.46258 ## MRI_PROSTATE_RO JP 29.46258 0.00000

Previously, the best way to quantify volumetric differences would be to use something like the SlicerRT extension for ITK. However, you then still needed to import that quantification into R for statistical modelling. Being able to do everything in R makes it much easier to follow best practices for reproducible research (such as this blog post).

It is also possible to plot the contours, slice by slice:

compareStructures(rtstruct$structures[c(6,7)], method="axial", plot=TRUE)

Admittedly, this is quite an artificial example, since the usual use case would be to compare two contours of the same patient. For example, to quantify volumetric changes over time. The RadOnc package has an excellent vignette that goes into more detail than what I’ve done here. There is also the 2014 journal article by Reid Thompson (details below). My original code is useful if you want to study the DICOM standard itself, but of course you need to use version 0.3-7 of oro.dicom to get it to work. The R package RadOnc is actively maintained and compatible with the latest versions of other packages on CRAN. It also offers additional features that are very handy for anyone who wants to perform statistical analysis of radiotherapy contours and dosimetry.

Further Reading

Dice, L.R. (1945) “Measures of the amount of ecologic association between species” Ecology 26(3): 297-302.

Dowling, J.; Malaterre, M; Greer, P.B. & Salvado, O. (2009) “Importing Contours from DICOM-RT Structure Sets” The Insight Journal

Hargrave, C.E.; Mason, N.; Guidi, R.; Miller, J-A; Becker, J.; Moores, M.T.; Mengersen, K.; Poulsen, M. & Harden, F. (2016) “Automated replication of cone beam CT-guided treatments in the Pinnacle³ treatment planning system for adaptive radiotherapy” J. Med. Rad. Sci. 63(1): 48-58.

Hausdorff, F. (1914) “Grundzüge der Mengenlehre” Veit and Company, Leipzig.

Moores, M.T.; Hargrave, C.E.; Deegan, T.; Poulsen, M.; Harden, F. & Mengersen, K. (2015) “An external field prior for the hidden Potts model with application to cone-beam computed tomography” Comput. Stat. Data Anal. 86: 27-41.

Pinter, C.; Lasso, A.;Wang, A.; Jaffray, D. & Fichtinger, G. (2012) “SlicerRT: Radiation therapy research toolkit for 3D Slicer” Med. Phys. 39(10): 6332–6338.

Thompson, R.F. (2014) “RadOnc: An R Package for Analysis of Dose-Volume Histogram and Three-Dimensional Structural Data” J. Rad. Onc. Info. 6(1): 98-100.

Whitcher, B.; Schmid, V.J. & Thornton, A. (2011) “Working with the DICOM and NIfTI Data Standards in R” J. Statist. Soft. 44(6): 1-28.