There is a great Python package pydicom that implements a nice interface in order to be able to access data within Dicom files.

One application which I wrote up was a dicom directory summarizer which goes through a list of dicom files and summarizes the types of MRI data in the directory.  I found myself getting frustrated trying to figure out which series of data was which given the huge number of dicom files (with really long names too!) in a directory.

The code below may be run within a Dicom directory and should run on Siemens Dicom data (IMA) files. It has been a while that I have run it so I can’t guarantee that it will work, but it should be a good place to start.

[cc lang="python"]
#! /usr/bin/python

import dicom
import os
import re

def blah(val):
return re.compile(‘[\-\w]+\.MR\.[\-\w]+\.\d+\.1\..*’).match(val, 1)

# Get a list of all the files
files = []
for entry in os.listdir(‘.’):
if ~os.path.isdir(entry) & entry.endswith(‘IMA’):
files.append(entry)

# Filter to find the first of each series
firsts = filter( blah, files )

firsts.sort(key=lambda s: int( re.compile(‘[\-\w]+\.MR\.[\-\w]+\.(\d+)\.1\..*’).search(s).group(1)) )

# Read the first and output some interesting stuff
d = dicom.ReadFile(firsts[1])
print ” Patient: ” + d.PatientsName
print “Acquired: ” + d.StudyDate[0:4]+”-”+d.StudyDate[4:6]+”-”+d.StudyDate[6:8] \
+ ” ” + d.StudyTime[0:2] + “:” + d.StudyTime[2:4] + “:” + d.StudyTime[4:6]
print “Comments: ” + d.ImageComments

# Run through the first file of each of the series
for entry in firsts:
d = dicom.ReadFile(entry)

num = re.compile(‘[\-\w]+\.MR\.[\-\w]+\.(\d+)\.1\..*’).search(entry).group(1)

out = “\t” + str(num) + “) ” + d.SeriesDescription

tt = ‘[_\-\w]+\.MR\.[_\-\w]+\.’+str(num)+’\..*’
count = 0
r = re.compile(tt)
for f in files:
if( r.match(f, 1) ):
#print “%s matches %d” % (f, ii)
count = count + 1

if( not re.compile(“.*(FA|TRACEW|TENSOR|ADC|MoCoSeries)$”).match(d.SeriesDescription, 1 ) ):
out += ” (vols=” + str(count)

if( ‘RepetitionTime’ in d ):
out += “, TR=” + str(d.RepetitionTime)

if( ‘EchoTime’ in d ):
out += “, TE=” + str(d.EchoTime)

out += “)”

print out

[/cc]