Re: Study description in DICOM


Study Description (0008,1030) is VR=LO which is limited to 64
characters, not 1024. Typically this field is/was used for a short
description of the medical procedure such as you would see in CPT
codes. In fact Study Description is a non-coded analog for Procedure
Code Sequence (0008,1032) where the code meaning element of the
sequence item (0008,0104) is also 64 characters. These short
descriptions are usually along the lines of "Chest X-ray, PA & LAT" ,
"MRI of the Head", or "CT Scan of Chest with and without Contrast"

It sounds like you're looking for a more extensive text field but its
unclear what content you intend to put in the field. There are some
longer text fields associated with DICOM reporting objects, but they
are not normally inserted directly into the image itself. The largest
text attributes in DICOM have VR=LT (long text) and are 10240 bytes
long. Here are several possibilities which may or may not meet the
intent of the content you're looking to put in it

(0010,21B0) Additional Patient History
(0010,4000) Patient Comments
(0020,4000) Image Comments
(0020,9158) Frame Comments
(0032,4000) Study Comments


(0040,0400) Comments on the scheduled procedure step
(0040,1400) Requested Procedure Comments
(0040,2400) Imaging Service Request Comments

(0038,4000) Visit Comments
(4008,0115) Interpretation Diagnosis Description

I've left off a few which tend to be specific to the equipment. The
three "40" group tags would normally be picked up from an entry on the
modality worklist and would be inserted into the image as part of the
Request Attributes Sequence (hence overwriting them with your own data
potentially destroys other relevant data in the image). The same
applies to the Additional Patient History attribute as well.

The "38" and "4008" attributes are part of DICOM Normalized object
definitions and are therefore not really legal to include in DICOM
images - but many applications do it anyway (something I've done
myself). However, you're really going outside the standard when you do
so.

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