DICOM File Tools
My preferred tool to check if a DICOM file complies to the DICOM standard is dciodvfy. This command line tool is available for Linux, Mac and Windows. It's part of the open-source dicom3tools package created and maintained by David A. Clunie. He is a radiologist, medical informaticist, DICOM open source software author and editor of the DICOM standard. David A. Clunie is currently an independent consultant and proprietor of PixelMed Pblishing LLC.
The synopsis of the tool is
dciodvfy [ -profile profilename ] [ -describe ] [ -dump ] [ -v|verbose ] [ -filename ]
Here is an example of a recent real DICOM file from an hospital in Luxembourg.
To inspect the content of a DICOM file you can use several free tools. The dcdump program from the dicom3tools package is a good choice. A similar command line tool is dcmdump from the Offis DICOM Toolkit DCMTK.
Osimis provides an online demo to parse a DICOM file with DCMTK using WebAssembly.
My preferred tool is the online demo from Chris Hafeys Cornerstone DICOM Parser which can be used in a web browser.
To modify, add or delete tags in a DICOM file, we need a DICOM editor. I tried several free and commercial DICOM editors. Most of them have problems when handling private tags. My preferred DICOM editor is the DVTk editor. The current version is 5.0.2, released in 2017.
- Profile David Clunie
- DICOM Testing with DVTk, by Marco Barnig