A Presentation by

Rohan Patkar
10-541

DICOM Data Dictionary

Part PS3.6 of the DICOM standard contains a complete DICOM Data

Dictionary, which is used to encode all standard DICOM attributes.
In addition to the standard dictionary, DICOM vendors can use their own
dictionaries for their proprietary data attributes. In either case, the
dictionary structure will follow the same rules.

The VR column in the dictionary specifies the format of each data element.
Data element Value Multiplicity (VM) defines whether the related element
may contain only one value of its type, or several.

A few lines from the DICOM Data Dictionary

Standard DICOM Data Dictionary

The DICOM Data Dictionary is the registry of all standard data
items (attributes) used in digital medicine.
These items should be formatted into 27 VRs.
To put them in order in the more than 2000-item list, all items are
first divided into numbered groups (based on loose similarity of the
item contents).
Groups are organized by individual elements. Thus, each item is
numbered with its own (group, element) number, also known as
element tags. The tagged elements are also called attributes, or
DICOM data elements, or simply DICOM elements.
Both groups and elements are numbered with hexadecimal
numbers.

From Real World to DICOM World

Application Entity
The AE VR represents a DICOM Application Entity. The
AE is essentially the name of a DICOM device or program
used to uniquely identify it (you cannot have two identical
AEs in your PACS network). This makes AE one of the
most important VRs for any DICOM network or PACS.
Even though DICOM does not have strict requirements for
AE naming, AEs are typically labelled with numbers and
uppercase characters only no spaces, punctuation signs,
or other characters.

Service Class Provider

(SCP)
A service class provider plays the server role to
perform operations and invoke notifications during
an Association. An example of a Storage Service
Class Provider would be an image storage device. In
this case, the image storage device is storing the
image that was sent by a Service class user.

Service Class User

(SCU)
A Service Class User plays the client role to
invoke operations and perform notifications
during an Association. An example of a Storage
Service Class User would be an image acquisition
device. In this case, the image acquisition device
will create and send a DICOM image by
requesting that a Service Class Provider store that
image.

Service Object Pair (SOP)

A Service-Object Pair (SOP) Class is defined by the
union of an IOD and a DIMSE Service Group. The SOP
Class definition contains the rules and semantics that
may restrict the use of the services in the DIMSE Service
Group or the Attributes of the IOD.

DICOM defines two types of SOP Classes, Normalized

and Composite. Normalized SOP Classes are defined as
the union of a Normalized IOD and a set of DIMSE-N
Services. Composite SOP Classes are defined as the
union of a Composite IOD and a set of DIMSE-C
Services.