DICOM medical image format

DICOM (Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine) is a file format for medical imaging that combines pixels and clinical data in one file.

For the basics, see LifeWire’s What Is a DICOM File?

Reference

The National Electrical Manufacturers Association maintains the primary reference for the DICOM format.

Two important bits are:

• Table 6-1. Registry of DICOM Data Elements
• Table 6.2-1. DICOM Value Representations
• Unique Identifiers UIDs

Deidentification and anonymization

Because the DICOM format combines both image and data, they typically contain plenty of PII and PHI. For research purposes, deidentification and anonymization is the first step.

• Table E.1-1. Application Level Confidentiality Profile Attributes.
• DICOM Anonymization by Marina Chane
• Duke Medicine’s Office of Information Security put out some Guidance on Deidentification/Anonymization of DICOM images for use in a Research Setting
• De-identification Revisited slides from David Clunie
• Is there an easy way to find the type of a DICOM tag?
• Protecting Protected Health Information from DICOM images
• Apparently Google has something called the Cloud Healthcare API which will help you De-identifying DICOM data.

More

• DICOM Library is an image sharing service for education and research.
• Pydicom is a pure Python package for working with DICOM files such as medical images, reports, and radiotherapy objects.
• You can tell Vladsiv is a funny guy because he starts off his DICOM File Format Basics article by thanking his former colleagues for introducing him to DICOM.