How do we quickly learn the meaning of MATLAB's dicominfo metadata?

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Daniel Bridges
Daniel Bridges le 23 Juin 2016
Modifié(e) : Daniel Bridges le 8 Août 2016
I have been unable to find MathWorks documentation explaining each of the dicominfo metadata entries, e.g. the meaning of [0;1] for "FileMetaInformationVersion". Must I simply look through the DICOM Standard? Do you have other recommendations? (My goal is to align contours with the dose distribution.)
Indeed, whereas MATLAB reports an ROIContourSequence, the Standard's section 'C.8.8.6 ROI Contour Module' does explain its structure fields 'ROIDisplayColor', 'ContourSequence', 'ReferencedROINumber'.
The DICOM Standard is so verbose, however, that I think it would save time if MathWorks would add a lookup function to provide a brief explanation (perhaps even quoting from the Standard) for each metadata entry. For example,
dicommeaning(info.ROIContourSequence.ReferencedROINumber)
ans = Uniquely identifies the referenced ROI described in the Structure Set ROI Sequence (3006,0020). (C.8.8.6 ROI Contour Module of the DICOM Standard)
It seems to me this is something WolframAlpha would do. Would implementing this feature put MathWorks in undesired competition?
Or is there simply not enough demand or need for it? Perhaps a simple Internet search accomplishes the same goal. For example, this OTpedia article results from searching Bing: "What is SOP Instance UID?" Similarly, searching Bing: "File Meta Information Version DICOM" yields Dabsoft's explanation (apparently an HTML version of the DICOM Standard's part10.pdf file).
In your experience, are Internet searches the fastest way to learn what is returned by dicominfo, rather than sifting through the DICOM Standard?

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Daniel Bridges
Daniel Bridges le 8 Août 2016
Modifié(e) : Daniel Bridges le 8 Août 2016
The fastest way to learn the meaning of dicominfo's DICOM metadata in my experience is to read the DICOM Standard using text-searchable PDFs; Internet searches can also yield the same results.
The DICOM Standard appeared daunting at first, but once I became oriented it was straightforward.

Plus de réponses (1)

Walter Roberson
Walter Roberson le 23 Juin 2016
The DICOM Standard is somewhat large, and is constantly changing. It would be a lot of work for Mathworks to add a descriptive dictionary of the terms.
  3 commentaires
Daniel Bridges
Daniel Bridges le 23 Juin 2016
Modifié(e) : Daniel Bridges le 23 Juin 2016
Thanks for additional context. I was hopeful for more freely available resources, or content available from MathWorks I hadn't discovered. Some of the links you've shared don't work, but I understand you're simply recommending books in general.
The question then becomes which book best explains the DICOM metadata ... Incidentally, the Philips download URL appears to have changed to an internal-use HTTP server instead of the FTP server referenced by NEMA.
Perhaps I can manage by referring to the NEMA's DICOM PS3.1 2016b (what I've been calling "the DICOM Standard") together with Internet searches...
Edit: Looks like you were right to say it's constantly changing: There's already DICOM PS3.1 2016c.
Walter Roberson
Walter Roberson le 23 Juin 2016
The TIFF tag documentation talks about DICOM and how some tags were being used by agreement for a 2 year period and then other tags were going to come into effect... When I saw that it became apparent to me that DICOM was changing yearly.

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