How to Use the Information in the DICOM Header for Quality Control/Quality Assurance Purposes

RC123C

How to Use the Information in the DICOM Header for Quality Control/Quality Assurance Purposes

Refresher/Informatics

Presented on November 27, 2011
Presented as part of RC123: Minicourse: Current Topics in Medical Physics—Quality Control and Quality Assurance in the Digital Era

A. Kyle Jones PhD, Presenter: Co-owner, Fluoroscopic Safety, LLC

After listening to this presentation, attendees should be able to: 1) Locate sources of information that help in identifying and understanding the data available in the DICOM header of radiologic images. 2) Access all data stored in the DICOM header, including data stored in private tags. 3) Interpret the data stored in the DICOM header. 4)Use data found in the DICOM header to perform routine quality control. 5) Demonstrate an understanding of the limitations of the data available in the DICOM header.

Ongoing quality control, including exposure analysis and rejected image analysis, is often neglected in digital radiography. A major reason for this neglect is the difficulty in gathering data to facilitate the quality control process. In film-screen imaging, the images themselves were the data necessary for performing exposure analysis and rejected image analysis. As digital images exist only in electrons and bits, images that are not archived to permanent storage are often deleted. There is much more to a digital image than meets the eye – the image data are only part of the entire digital image object. As with digital photographs, metadata is stored along with the digital image data, in what we call the “header”. The header is a rich source of information related to the acquisition and processing of the digital image. The type and amount of information stored in the header depends on several factors, including the type of object, the manufacturer of the equipment that generated the object, and other factors. As a DICOM header is created each time an image is created, the information included in the header is a valuable resource for ongoing quality control – all that you have to do is find it, collect it, an analyze it. The goal of this course is to teach attendees where to find this information, how to interpret it, and finally how to put the information to use in the quality control process.