Author: John Ollinger (---.waisman.wisc.edu)
Date: 11-12-07 14:02
I am about to release a package of image I/O routines written in Python that supports dicom, nifti, and afni formats among others. I would like to include some of the dicom informaton in the extension header, but I have not found a standard way to do this. I am therefore assuming there is not definition yet. Please correct me if I am wrong.
I like the approach taken by the afni extension. What would take to define a dicom extension? I would like to propose an xml extension with fields consisting of the dicom tag (e.g.,"0x0018,0x0001"), a keyword formed by changing the dicom dictionary description to a keyword, and the value.
I would not specify which tags are present but I would want to assume that some are not included. The dicom header contains some very large fields and a given study often consists of >10,000 files. Including every header item would include too much extraneous info at a substantial cost. Specifying a restrictive set would eliminate too much interesting manufacturer-specific stuff.
