Access all MetaData keys of a DICOM image with SimpleITK

Question

I'm using SimpleITK to work on DICOM PET images in Python.

I need to access some information stored in the DICOM header to convert the pixel value from Bq/mL to SUV. I am fine with accessing the MetaData Dictionnary with img.GetMetaData(key) . However, some keys I want to access are not available in the MetaData Dictonnary delivered by SimpleITK.

An error is raised when I try to access the tags '0018,1074' and '0018,1072' for example whereas it seems that these tags exist because I can find them in ImageJ. I also tried to access them with the private tags taken into account. Do you know why these tags are not available in the list of tags given by GetMetaDataKeys() ? How can I access them?

Thanks for your help

Answer 1

DICOM datasets have a hierarchical (tree) structure. The attributes in your question are sub items of the Radiopharmaceutical Information Sequence (0054,0016). I suspect that you are trying to access them as top level elements like patient name (0010,0010).

I do not know how to do this in python, but I would expect that you can obtain an array of arrays from the attribute Radiopharmaceutical Information Sequence (0054,0016). Each array would represent one item in the sequence and each of these items may give you access to the attributes you want to read.