Disclaimer: Note the removal of patient identifiers is based on 'dicomanon' function provided by Matlab and thus the user needs to independently verify if the anonymized files are as per the rules set by the required governing institution
User is required to place each series in different folders. The program will ask the user to point to the first DICOM file in a particular series. Generally for the medical images the Dicom filename is a long list of characters with many periods
eg: x.x.xxxxx.xxxxxxxxxx.xxx.000.dcm
This program will work only in the case where the series files are in increasing order from "000" to "999"... i.e the series has filename that is ordered such that the numbers change only between the second-last and last period (quite typical of a medical study)
Example of filelist:
Dicom File 1: x.x.xxxxx.xxxxxxxxxx.xxx.522.dcm
Dicom File 2: x.x.xxxxx.xxxxxxxxxx.xxx.523.dcm
Dicom File 3: x.x.xxxxx.xxxxxxxxxx.xxx.524.dcm
...
Dicom File n: x.x.xxxxx.xxxxxxxxxx.xxx.793.dcm
The program will create the anonymized files with the name as
"anon_filelist(i)" where i represents the image number. The program uses the dicomanon function provided in MATLAB.
This program could be useful if the image files within a study with artifacts/problems are required to be sent to the vendor for help in troubleshooting procedure; for such a process anonymizing the images with respect to patient identifiers is always recommended. |
