// the find
fo-dicom/mdcm
mDCM - A DICOM library in C#
mDCM is an abandoned C# DICOM library — the README itself tells you to go use fo-dicom instead. It was the predecessor project from the same organization (fo-dicom) before they rewrote it. Last touched in 2016, so it's been dead for nearly a decade.
- Historically shipped working DICOM codec support including JPEG (8/12/16-bit), JPEG-LS via CharLS, and JPEG 2000 via OpenJPEG — the codec layer was real and functional
- The native C codec integration (separate x86/x64 builds for each JPEG variant) shows the authors understood the performance constraints of medical imaging pipelines
- It was the foundation that fo-dicom was built on, so the design decisions here informed a project that is still actively maintained
- Officially discontinued — the README is a redirect notice, not documentation. There is no reason to adopt this over fo-dicom
- Ships binary DLLs (NLog, NUnit, Aga.Controls) checked into the 3rd Party directory, a practice abandoned for good reason; no NuGet, no reproducible builds
- Windows-only: the codec layer is .vcxproj files targeting x86/x64 MSVC builds with no cross-platform story
- 10 years of unpatched CVEs in vendored copies of libijg, OpenJPEG, and OpenSSL — using this in anything medical-adjacent would be a compliance nightmare