dicomitkmedicalsimpleitk

What direction do the DICOM instance numbers grow along?


By direction I mean for example from a patient's head to bottom or from his bottom to head. The CHEST CT scans I have seen so far indicates that Instance Number 1 slice is usually the first one down from the upper part of the body but I don't know whether this is part of the standard or there are some other tags that I should inspect into to determine.


Solution

  • There is no rule in DICOM that requires the Instance Number to be related to the slice position in a particular way. The link of Bartloimiej shows that there is a rule how the slice coordinates defined by Image Position Patient (0020,0027) and Image Orientation Patient (0020, 0037) are related to directions in the patient's body (head, feet, etc.)

    So if you want to apply spatial ordering, these attributes are what you want to use. Slice Location (0020,1041) will not help you as well:

    C.7.6.2.1.2 [...] This information is relative to an unspecified implementation specific reference point.

    For original (i.e. Image Type (0008,0008) is ORIGINAL\PRIMARY...) CT slices, it is quite safe to assume that some growth in the Z-Direction is always present in a volumetric dataset. But for MRI or for reconstructed CT-slices (MPR), you may find datasets in which slices are parallel to the xz or yz plane. If your application is supposed to handle such images, make sure to avoid division by zero...