How to modify some fields using DicomBrowser

[grace]

Hi,

I use DicomBrowser to remove some sensitive information, for example accession number, patiend id. But I find that DicomBrowser doesn't display some fields, for example OtherPatientIDsSequence (0010,1002). This field may contain some sensitive information that will display on XNAT by clicking the function "View Dicom Headers". Could you tell me how to use DicomBrowser to clear the contents in this field?

Thank you,

Grace

[David Maffitt]

Hi Grace,

Unfortunately, DicomBrowser does not handle sequence items.  We are working on an upgrade for this, but progress is slow due to lack of developer resources.

You can do what you want with an XNAT tool called DicomEdit6. This is a library but it can be invoked from the command-line tool that allows one to specify desired modifications in an "anonymization script". The syntax for this scripting language is at https://wiki.xnat.org/display/XTOOLS/DicomEdit+6.2+Language+Reference.  This is an extension of the scripting language available in DicomBrowser (DicomEdit v3). DicomEdit v6 will make it into DicomBrowser eventually, but not yet.

The latest source is at https://bitbucket.org/xnatdcm/dicom-edit6.

A runnable jar of a recent build of the library can be found in https://bitbucket.org/xnatdcm/dicom-edit6/downloads. This currently is dicom-edit6-1.0.8-SNAPSHOT-jar-with-dependencies.jar. It can be run as:

java -jar dicom-edit6-1.0.8-SNAPSHOT-jar-with-dependencies.jar

This will provide the usage info:

haven:bin drm$ java -jar dicom-edit6-1.0.8-SNAPSHOT-jar-with-dependencies.jar

No scripts were specified.

anon -s <script-file>[,<lookup-file>] [-s <script-file>[,<lookup-file> ...] -i <path to input dicom file or dir> -o <path to output dir>

Scripts will be processed in the order specified.

Each script may optionally reference a lookup table.

You would likely run it as:

java -jar dicom-edit6-1.0.8-SNAPSHOT-jar-with-dependencies.jar -s <your-script-file> -i <path to input dicom file or dir> -o <path to output dir>

If you wanted to remove the sequence element entirely, <your-script-file> would have contents:

 version "6.2"
 - (0010,1002)

You could also use another tool called Clinical Trial Processor (CTP): http://mircwiki.rsna.org/index.php?title=CTP-The_RSNA_Clinical_Trial_Processor.

It also provides the ability to alter DICOM by applying statements from a script written in CTP's syntax.

[grace]

Thank you very much for your advice.