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- If a collection of images is produced by equipment from different manufacturers, collisions may occur in the sets of private elements to be retained and discarded. For example, element (0009, 1001) from manufacturer A may contain an important physical parameter while that same element from manufacturer B may contain PHI.
- If the collection has images created by an acquisition modality and then modified by another application (PACS, workstation), a private group may have multiple reserved blocks. Also, one cannot assume that the original creator will always choose reserved block 0010.
DICOM Tag Sniffer
To simplify implementation of "clean" instructions specified in DICOM PS 3.15, a new tool was developed to help inspect the contents of DICOM elements, allowing free text entry by a technician and Private Tags for potential PHI. This tool scans a folder, includes subfolders for DICOM objects, and produces several different outputs that depend on the mode used and input profiles. The software reads each DICOM object and iterates through each public and private element. The software then uses the profiles below to determine whether or not to retain the value of the element for later inspection:
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