Storing level information for WSI Image

[samnaction]

I have WSI SVS Image, I am planning to create dcm files for this svs file. SVS files will be the same as TIFF File with different levels for different resolutions.

Let's say I have SVS files with 4 levels

Level 0 -> thumbnail
Level 1 -> macro
Level 2 -> 5x resolution
Level 3 -> 10x resolution

I am creating 1 dcm file per level. So, in this case, I will create 4 dcm files. Is this the standard ? or it should be combined and created as a single dcm file?

Here is my name for the generated dcm files.

level0,level1,level2,level3 --> dcm files
DICOMDIR -> dicomdirectory


The problem comes in the reading part. I needed to read this dcm files, I thought to read the DICOMDIR to iterate all the dcm files. Currently, the association between level and file is the filename and ReferencedFileID in DICOMDIR.
If the filename doesn't have level number in it, I won't be knowing which level I am reading. One solution is I can have a private tag in dcm file to store the level information.

Is there any way to hold the level information in DICOMDIR without storing a private tag in dcm file?

[J. Riesmeier]

Your questions seem to be related to the DICOM standard only and not to the DCMTK. So, you should read the relevant sections of part 3 of the standard in order to understand how the VL Whole Slide Microscopy Image IOD works. This also includes how the relationship between localizer/thumbnail, macro, intermediate and baseline image can be encoded.