Hi James,
A new “efficient DICOM stack” was mentioned in the changelog for 3.19 and I was just wondering what sort of changes these are r.e. a) the stack itself and b) what efficiency was improved…more a point of interest rather than anything else. Please and thanks!
Ethan B.
The new lazy/efficient stack is for minimizing memory usage. In RadMachine customers were loading massive CBCT datasets (~1GB). Most of the images were duplicated, but when the stack is loaded it loads all the images into memory up front. Really, only a few images are needed at the end of the day after an initial scan. So this new stack method will read and write to disk lazily rather than load everything into memory. This means only about 1-2 images are in memory at any given time. It slows things down by ~10% since it’s not all in memory but the memory saving is quite large, around 80-90%. For normal-sized CBCTs and/or capable PCs with 8+GB of memory, it’s likely not worth converting to. TL;DR: it’s for RadMachine.