An Overview of the DICOM File Format

The following topics provide general information about the DICOM File Format. It is designed to help familiarize you with DICOM. For more detailed information on the DICOM File Format, you should refer to the DICOM Standard, published by the

National Electrical Manufacturers Association

1300 N. 17th Street

Rosslyn, Virginia 22209 USA

For more information on programming using this toolkit, refer to Programming With LEADTOOLS.

Basic DICOM File Structure

Data Element Fields

Value Representations

Value Multiplicity (VM) and Delimitation

Data Element Structure

Group Length

Big-Endian versus Little Endian Byte Ordering

Data Element Type

Nesting of Data Sets

Item Encoding Rules

Delimitation of the Sequence of Items

Repeating Groups

Retired Data Elements

Private Data Elements

Private Data Element Tags

Encoding of Pixel Data

Pixel Data Encoding of Related Data Elements

Native or Encapsulated Format Encoding

Compression

Unique Identifiers

Information Object Definitions

Composite IOD

Normalized IOD

Attributes

Normalized and Composite SOP Classes

Modules

Definitions

Class Example

Module Example