DICOM Tag Reference - CodeSwordsman

Patient name and the main de-identification target; PN separates family and given name with ^

Primary patient identifier used to link studies across PACS and HIS

Birth date in DA form, often de-identified together with the age

Sex as CS; allowed values are M, F or O, and an empty value is valid

Study date in DA; range queries join the start and end date with a hyphen

Accession number that links the study to a RIS order

Free-text study description such as CT head without contrast, useful for searching

Modality as CS, such as CT, MR, US, CR or DX

Image origin and type; multiple values are ordered with backslash separators

Series description, usually containing the pulse sequence and reconstruction

SOP Class UID that identifies the object type and its allowed processing

Unique instance identifier; editing it breaks every link to indexes and reports

Study unique identifier, required as the key when retrieving with C-MOVE

Series unique identifier shared by every instance of the same series

Number of rows; together with Columns it defines the pixel matrix size

Number of columns; pixel data is stored in row-major order

Samples per pixel: 1 for grayscale images and 3 for color images

Color space such as MONOCHROME2, RGB or YBR_FULL

Bits allocated per pixel, typically 8 or 16

0 for unsigned and 1 for signed integers; CT images are usually signed

Rescale intercept; with the slope it converts stored values into HU

Rescale slope, which can be present on both CT and MR images

Default window center; multiple values are paired with window widths in order

Default window width, paired with window center to define the gray range

Instance number; it reflects acquisition order, not the slice position

Patient-space coordinates in mm of the first pixel of the slice

Six direction cosines describing the row and column directions

Nominal slice thickness in mm, which may differ from the actual spacing

Equipment manufacturer, for example SIEMENS or GE MEDICAL SYSTEMS

Manufacturer model name, for example SOMATOM Definition

Station name that identifies the acquiring workstation

Transfer syntax UID that defines implicit or explicit VR and the byte order

Person name; ^ separates family, given, middle names and prefix

Unique identifier with digits and dots only, padded to an even length

DA holds YYYYMMDD dates and TM holds HHMMSS times

Decimal and integer strings; a single DS value is limited to 16 bytes

Code string with uppercase enumerated values such as CT, STUDY or AXIAL

Binary data: OB is byte oriented while OW is read as 16-bit words

Sequence of nested datasets that has to be accessed by hierarchical path

US is an unsigned 16-bit integer and UL is an unsigned 32-bit integer