This makes it hard to sort files from the folder level (in some cases, file names are so long that they exceed the 256 character maximum on Windows computers which causes saving/loading issues)

DICOM files are named with a unique identifier (UID).

DICOM saves one file per slice, so a 3D scan may have hundreds of files.

The DICOM file format is documented in the DICOM Standard, which is required reading for most informatics specialists.įor a beginner’s background, this blog is also a great introduction.įor deep learning tasks, the endgame is usually to load the image data as a NumPy or other file, and in this case, DICOM can be difficult: Furthermore, DICOM files are unambiguous because each file contains a header that exhaustively documents the hospital, patient, scanner, and image information, much like how smartphone information and even GPS is encoded in the metadata every time you snap an iPhone picture. As my projects get more advanced, I’ve often found myself rewriting code to read and write DICOM files directly. So why use DICOM? Other file formats may be more convenient, but in clinical practice, everything uses the DICOM format. Besides DICOM, you may also see medical images saved in the NIFTI format (file suffix “.nii”), PNG or JPEG format, or even Python file objects like NumPy arrays. There are other file formats for storing images.

How to read, write, and organize medical imagesĭICOM is the primary file format for storing and transferring medical images in a hospital’s database.

What is a dicomdir file