DICOM is a standard for handling, storing, printing, and transmitting information in medical imaging. -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DICOM There are free viewers for it, e.g. MRicron from the list at http://www.sph.sc.edu/comd/rorden/dicom.html#links , which I managed to download from http://student.agh.edu.pl/~bauer/ (the downloads from other sites were interrupted before completion). The binary works, but although it's stated that it is open-source, I saw no sources in the archive. Another free tool for DICOM which has been discused in relation to ALT is mentioned here: http://lists.altlinux.org/pipermail/sisyphus/2008-November/335570.html . ImageMagick's "convert" accepts the DICOM format (the image files), but conversion to PNG gives black images, so presumably it doesn't work. (I managed to convert the images to PNG by using MRicron.)
A link from http://www.sph.sc.edu/comd/rorden/workshop/mricron/source.html is broken but mricron.zip is easily googlable: I've just downloaded http://www.nitrc.org/frs/download.php/893/mricron.zip linked from http://www.nitrc.org/frs/?group_id=152 Would you mind packaging it yourself or prefer me to package it for you? I guess you're more than adequate maintainer for things you're interested in, and I probably won't use DICOM. Notifying ImageMagick (or GraphicsMagick) upstream of issues with conversion might be worthy too.
currently in sisyphus several programs support working with dicom format: aeskulap, xmedcon, dcmtk. MRIcron URL: https://github.com/neurolabusc/MRIcron Development of the MRIcron has been moved to another projects: https://github.com/rordenlab/MRIcroGL12 https://github.com/rordenlab/dcm2niix https://github.com/neurolabusc/NiiStat
More advanced version of Mricron - MRIcroGL available in repository.