Handling DICONDE files using Pydicom

[RegalArtifex]

How and where should I change the tags so that this package can be used to read and write DICONDE files ?

[darcymason]

The stackoverflow question pointed to a DICONDE dictionary in dcmtk.

It looks like there are standard non-private (even group number tags) there, and some private ones. I haven't looked to see, but perhaps some of the non-private ones are already in pydicom's dictionary.

Both could be added dynamically in user code if massaged to the correct Python dict format used by pydicom (non-private / private)

Or, we could consider adding another dictionary file (e.g. _diconde_dict.py) to pydicom to support DICONDE. It seems that would be relatively easy to do, so I would support that. In that case, it would mimic the dict formats in _dicom_dict.py and _private_dict.py.

[mrbean-bremen]

Or, we could consider adding another dictionary file (e.g. _diconde_dict.py) to pydicom to support DICOMDE.

In principle I'm in favour of that, though I couldn't find any public information about the standard apart from the tag definitions in dcmtk (maybe I didn't look at the right place), or any example data.
Also I understand that some of the DICOMDE tags overwrite existing DICOM tags, and others are not used. If we use such a dictionary, we should add some DICOMDE mode to use it, e.g. change the used dictionaries if a DICOMDE dataset is detected (I assume there is some easy way to do this).

[darcymason]

I understand that some of the DICOMDE tags overwrite existing DICOM tags

That's unfortunate.

If we use such a dictionary, we should add some DICOMDE mode to use it, e.g. change the used dictionaries if a DICOMDE dataset is detected (I assume there is some easy way to do this).

@RegalArtifex, is there a public example file we could use? It would be necessary for adding test suite tests, and may answer the problem of how to tell early in dcmread if it is a DICONDE file being read in.

[RegalArtifex]

@RegalArtifex, is there a public example file we could use? It would be necessary for adding test suite tests, and may answer the problem of how to tell early in dcmread if it is a DICONDE file being read in.

Unfortunately I am not able to find any public file. The only resource available is the dcmtk repo. I don't know why sample DICONDE files are not available over the internet whereas DICOM files are readily available.

[darcymason]

Unfortunately I am not able to find any public file

Do you have any diconde files? If so, you could copy the pydicom repr of the output (assuming you can get that far), edit any confidential values, and post the text here; we could create a file from that and have something to work with. Without a file, it would be very hard to adapt pydicom for diconde, we'd just be guessing if we got it right.

[mrbean-bremen]

I'm moving this to the discussion area. It is not clear if we will do this, or if it is even possible to get free information about the standard (seems that you can only buy it).