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Core Introduction

This section describes the core concepts in the Cornerstone3D (@cornerstonejs/core). Cornerstone3D is more than a "rendering" library. It handles:

  • rendering of the image (both using GPU or CPU)
  • caching of the data and metadata
  • providing a framework for image/volume loader APIs
  • providing metadata API support.

The purpose of this section is to give an overview of the core concepts in Cornerstone3D.

๐Ÿ“„๏ธ Metadata Providers

Medical images typically come with lots of non-pixel-wise metadata such as the pixel spacing of the image, the patient ID, or the scan acquisition date. With some file types (e.g. DICOM), this information is stored within the file header and can be read and parsed and passed around your application. With others (e.g. JPEG, PNG), this information needs to be provided independently from the actual pixel data. Even for DICOM images, however, it is common for application developers to provide metadata independently from the transmission of pixel data from the server to the client since this can considerably improve performance.