DICOM tutorial

So, you want to learn about dicom, eh?

The only good reference I could find on the web is the DICOM standard. You need this, so download it now.

http://medical.nema.org/

Preamble and header

To start with, DICOM files might have a header, or they might not. The standard says they need a header, but older dicom files won’t have this. If it has a header, it is in the following format:

  • 128 byte file preamble, containing application-specific data

  • 4 bytes containing the string “DICM”

The dicom preamble and header are described in section 10 of the standard.

Data elements

A dicom data set (such as a file) includes a sequence of data elements. A single data element is composed of the following fields:

  • 4 byte tag (includes 2 byte group number + 2 byte element number)

  • 2 byte value representation (optional, with optional 2 byte reserved field)

  • 2 or 4 byte value length

  • variable length value field (with even bytes)

The layout of data elements is described in section 5 of the standard.

Value representations

A value representation (VR) is the “type” of the data. For example, it denotes whether an item is a string, integer, UID, or sequence.

The list of value representations are described in section 5 of the standard.

Value length

The value length is either a 2 or 4 byte unsigned integer. It is 2 bytes if there is an explicit VR, otherwise it is 4 bytes. If there is no meta-information header, this choice is ambiguous.

Explicit and implicit VR

VR can be either explicit or implicit. Explicit means that the VR is specified together with each object, whereas implicit means that the application has to lookup the correct VR from a dictionary. The dictionary maps (group,element) pairs to VR values.

The application describes whether it will use implicit or explicit VR in the application header. A special case is made of the sequence tags (fffe,e000), (fffe,e00d), and (fffe,e0dd) which are always implicit VR.

Meta-information header

Because the data elements can be explicit or implicit VR, and because the data can be either little-endian or big-endian, DICOM uses the data elements in group 0002 to explain these ambiguities. The data in this group is called the meta-information header.

Explanation of the meta information header is described in section 10 of the standard.

Attribute types

Attributes can be required, conditionally requried, or optional. The attribute type tells us which of these holds.

  • 1 Required, cannot be empty

  • 1C Conditionally required, cannot be empty

  • 2 Required, can be empty

  • 2C Conditionally required, can be empty

  • 3 Optional

This is explained in section 7.4 of the standard.

DICOM RT

These are extra IODs (information objects) defined in the DICOM standard: RT Image, RT Plan, RT Ion Plan, RT Dose, and RT Structure Set.

Explanation of DICOM RT is found in section 3 of the standard.