What we must do therefore is to strive and persevere and never give up.” ~ Dalai Lama XIV If the goal is noble, whether or not it is realized within our lifetime is largely irrelevant. “To remain indifferent to the challenges we face is indefensible. This is where DICOM directory files come in. However, searching through these directories and the large number of images they contain when needing to perform any diagnostic, research or error correction procedures even with these elements/tags is not a trivial task as you have to process each file individually.

This makes total sense as there is a risk of attributing an image to the wrong patient, study or series and can lead to some dire consequences for diagnosis (and is reason that DICOM objects have information contained within in the form of DICOM elements or tags). It also states that no information must be inferred/extracted from these names. The standard restricts the file names/identifiers contained within to 8 characters (uppercase alphabetic characters and numbers only) to keep in conformity with legacy/historical requirements. The PACS server or an offline archive/media such as CD/DVD may store these image sets in a nested directory structure (by patient, by study and by series). If you are dealing with modalities such as CT or MR, you will often deal with large numbers of images generated as a result of a scan procedure (sometimes hundreds if not thousands). This tutorial also assumes that you know the basics of C# or any equivalent object-oriented language such as Java or C++. NET and C# - Making Sense of the DICOM File” to understand the structure of a DICOM file. You may also want to look at my other tutorial titled “DICOM Basics using. If you are totally new to DICOM, please have a quick look at my earlier article titled “Introduction to the DICOM Standard” for a quick introduction to the standard.

This is part of my series of articles on the DICOM standard.

Testing Tools for DICOM Directory Troubleshooting.

Approach 2 - Taking Full Control by Object Traversal.

Approach 1 - Use Built-In Convenience Methods.

Support for DICOM Directory Operations in Fellow Oak (fo-dicom) Toolkit.

Fellow Oak (fo-dicom) DICOM Toolkit - Quick Overview.

NET and C# - Reading DICOM Directories Contents

How to open dicomdir file