Support for "Retain Safe Private Option"

[lassoan]

We are interested in preserving private fields that are known to be safe to keep - as described in https://dicom.nema.org/medical/dicom/current/output/html/part15.html#sect_E.3.10

Is there a way to specify private fields with a private creator (e.g., (7053,xx00) | Philips PET Private Group) in the DICOM fields definition?

[pchoisel]

Hi,

You can specify which tags you want to keep by passing the argument -t with the tag and the action keep : https://github.com/KitwareMedical/dicom-anonymizer?tab=readme-ov-file#custom-rules
You can also create a JSON file to specify those custom rules, which will be more convenient when you have a lot of tags to keep : https://github.com/KitwareMedical/dicom-anonymizer?tab=readme-ov-file#custom-rules-with-dictionary-file

For tag ranges or wildcards like 7053,xx00, you can use the syntax (0xwwww, 0xxxxx, 0xyyyy, 0xzzzz) where wwww and xxxx are respectively the tag group and element you want to match and yyyy and zzzz are the masks you want to use as wildcards.
So to keep the private tags 7053,xx00, you'd need to add the argument -t (0x7053, 0x0000, 0xFFFF, 0x00FF) keep
This also works with a JSON dictionary.

I noticed a bug when anonymizing datasets with private tags and using ranges. I fixed it in #97

Finally, dicom-anonymizer does not have a list of safe tags as mentioned in the DICOM standard that it would automatically keep. I don't think it would be very difficult to implement.

[lassoan]

Thanks for the reply, very useful. Is there a way to specify private tags properly, with private creator string?

[pchoisel]

Unfortunately no, support for private tags is pretty bare.
A new type of argument to target private tags specifically could be really nice here