Developer guide

Source code is available at Github and can be cloned via git:

git clone https://github.com/imagingdatacommons/highdicom ~/highdicom

The highdicom package can be installed in develop mode for local development:

pip install -e ~/highdicom

Pull requests

Don’t commit code changes to the master branch. New features should be implemented in a separate branch called feature/* and bug fixes should be applied in separate branch called bugfix/*.

Before creating a pull request on Github, read the coding style guideline, run the tests and check PEP8 compliance.

Coding style

Code must comply with PEP 8. The flake8 package is used to enforce compliance.

The project uses numpydoc for documenting code according to PEP 257 docstring conventions. Further information and examples for the NumPy style can be found at the NumPy Github repository and the website of the Napoleon sphinx extension.

All API classes, functions and modules must be documented (including “private” functions and methods). Each docstring must describe input parameters and return values. Types must be specified using type hints as specified by PEP 484 (see typing module) in both the function definition as well as the docstring.

Running tests

The project uses pytest to write and runs unit tests. Tests should be placed in a separate tests folder within the package root folder. Files containing actual test code should follow the pattern test_*.py.

Install requirements:

pip install -r ~/highdicom/requirements_test.txt

Run tests (including checks for PEP8 compliance):

cd ~/highdicom
pytest --flake8

Building documentation

Install requirements:

pip install -r ~/highdicom/requirements_docs.txt

Build documentation in HTML format:

cd ~/highdicom
sphinx-build -b html docs/ docs/build/

The built index.html file will be located in docs/build.

Design principles

Interoperability with Pydicom - Highdicom is built on the pydicom library. Highdicom types are typically derived from the pydicom.dataset.Dataset or pydicom.sequence.Sequence classes and should remain interoperable with them as far as possible such that experienced users can use the lower-level pydicom API to inspect or change the object if needed.

Standard DICOM Terminology - Where possible, highdicom types, functions, parameters, enums, etc map onto concepts within the DICOM standard and should follow the same terminology to ensure that the meaning is unambiguous. Where the terminology used in the standard may not be easily understood by those unfamiliar with it, this should be addressed via documentation rather than using alternative terminology.

Standard Compliance on Encoding - Highdicom should not allow users to create DICOM objects that are not in compliance with the standard. The library should validate all parameters passed to it and should raise an exception if they would result in the creation of an invalid object, and give a clear explanation to the user why the parameters passed are invalid. Furthermore, highdicom objects should always exist in a state of standards compliance, without any intermediate invalid states. Once a constructor has completed, the user should be confident that they have a valid object.

Standard Compliance on Decoding - Unfortunately, many DICOM objects found in the real world have minor deviations from the standard. When decoding DICOM objects, highdicom should tolerate minor deviations as far as they do not interfere with its functionality. When highdicom needs to assume that objects are standard compliant in order to function, it should check this assumption first and raise an exception explaining the issue to the user if it finds an error. Unless there are exceptional circumstances, highdicom should not attempt to work around issues in non-compliant files produced by other implementations.

The Decoding API - Highdicom classes implement functionality for conveniently accessing information contained within the relevant dataset. To use this functionality with existing pydicom dataset, such as those read in from file or received over network, the dataset must first be converted to the relevant highdicom type. This is implemented by the alternative from_dataset() or from_sequence() constructors on highdicom types. These methods should perform “eager” type conversion of the dataset and all datasets contained within it into the relevant highdicom types, where they exist. This way, objects created from scratch by users and those converted from pydicom datasets using from_dataset() or from_sequence() should appear identical to users and developers as far as possible.