DICOM anonymizer comparison

There are a number of good and not-so-good DICOM libraries and toolkits available. However, it is not so easy to choose between them. For example, most DICOM anonymizers have bugs, which cause them to be unusable in some fashion or another.

Over the years, I’ve used a lot of DICOM anonymizers. The following is a list of common problems that I have encountered:

• Some date fields cannot be changed (duh)
• It is not possible to preserve relative dates (for example, we would like to set StudyDate to Jan 1, 2000, but preserve the fact that StructureSetDate occurred 35 days later)
• Private tags are always deleted (on our GE scanner, these contain important acquisition details)
• Comments, diagnosis descriptions, or other fields cannot be reset (may contain protected information)
• It is not possible to modify strings (for example, the physician might type “smith-final” into the StructureSetName field, and we would like to delete “smith” but preserve “final” )
• UIDs are not changed, or relationships between UIDs are not preserved (duh)

Anonymize IJ DICOM

http://rsbweb.nih.gov/ij/plugins/anonymize-ij-dicom/index.html

Looks doubtful.

Conquest DICOM

http://www.xs4all.nl/~ingenium/dicom.html

License: BSD-style

Version: 1.4.15

CTN

DICOM Anonymizer

http://sourceforge.net/projects/dicomanonymizer/

Looks doubtful.

DICOM Rewriter

http://rsbweb.nih.gov/ij/plugins/dicom-rewriter.html

Looks doubtful.

DVTk

GDCM v2

LONI Inspector

MIRC DicomEditor

http://mircwiki.rsna.org/index.php?title=DicomEditor

License: MIRC license

Version: 22

A pretty nice tool for batch editing of DICOM files. You can modify each tag using separate rules, and all fields are accessible.

Private fields can be preserved.

Dates are properly anonymized. There is a feature which allows date offsets, but it only partially works (@incrementdate works fine, but I could not get @offsetdate to work).

It includes a regular expression substitution tool for strings.

It includes a UID remapper, based on UID hashing. However, UIDs within Sequences don’t seem to work (they are not remapped).

MIview

http://www.nitrc.org/projects/miview/

Tudor DICOM

Other information

The following link includes a comparison of different DICOM toolkits in terms of their APIs:

http://www.vph-noe.eu/vph-repository/doc_download/141-dicom-survey

Here are more links of DICOM toolkits:

http://www.goomedic.com/development-dicom-libraries-frameworks-and-toolkits-for-developers.html?wpmp_switcher=desktop

http://www.uiowa.edu/~mihpclab/mias.html