help with reading DICOM

All,

I'm reading in a 3D DICOM dataset using the following function. The file is 300 images of 512x512 slices. Each slice is a separate file.

eval(['filelist =handles.filelist_pl' num2str(num) ';'])

eval(['pathname =handles.pathname_pl' num2str(num) ';'])

count = 1; images = [];

for i=3:size(filelist,1)

    if filelist(i).isdir ~= true                                          
         fname = filelist(i).name;                                          

            tmp = dicomread([pathname fname]);  
            dcm_data = dicominfo([pathname fname]);
            images(:,:,count) = tmp;                                         
            count = count+1;

    end  
end

dims = size(images);

I'm running into memory problems trying to load this in as an array, which I presume is taking up one single huge chunk of memory. It works fine for smaller 3D datasets (like 512x512x50) but gives up for anything larger.

Is there a more efficient way to read this data in? Perhaps a cell array or something? I'm using 2011a

Thanks, Jim