DICOM Command Line Tools - CodeSwordsman

Dump every tag with its VR and value; always the first step when debugging

Print only the given tag; repeat +P to select several tags

Skip loading very long values such as pixel data for faster dumps

Print long values completely; by default they are shortened

Print the hierarchy as a tree, showing sequences and nested items

Convert values affected by Specific Character Set to UTF-8 for readable output

Write Explicit VR Little Endian, the most widely supported transfer syntax

Write Implicit VR Little Endian, common for legacy PACS and media

Write Explicit VR Big Endian, only needed by a few legacy devices

Write Deflated Explicit VR Little Endian to shrink the dataset

Export a PNG preview; dcm2pnm is the older name of the same tool

Export a lossy baseline JPEG, handy for thumbnails

Wrap a plain JPEG or BMP image into DICOM using a template dataset

Send a C-ECHO to verify connectivity and AE title configuration

Query by patient name; -P selects the Patient Root information model

Query studies by patient ID and a study date range

Extract the responses as rsp0001.dcm and following files

Send images; pointing it at a live PACS writes into the archive

Receive images locally and store them into the given directory

Retrieve a whole study from the PACS by its Study Instance UID

Change the patient name in place, rewriting the original file

Rewrite the patient ID of every *.dcm in place; this cannot be undone

Erase the birth date element from the file; erasure is permanent

Erase all private data from the file, a must for real de-identification

Generate new Study, Series and SOP Instance UIDs for the file

Disable the backup and rewrite the file; there is no way back

Validate mandatory attributes and encoding errors against the IOD

Quickly inspect the file meta information and transfer syntax

Re-encoding once exposes structural damage in the dataset

Keep printing even on parse errors, which helps diagnose broken files

Diff two tag dumps to locate exactly what changed

dcm4che passes the peer as AE@host:port via -c, unlike DCMTK

dcm4che uses -m for matching keys and -L to pick the query level

Write DICOM JSON to stdout, with pixel data as a bulkdata reference

Pretty-print the JSON with indentation for diffing and review

Encode DS and IS values as JSON numbers instead of strings

Inline bulkdata such as pixel data, which can blow up the JSON size