Updating the Data Dictionary of dcmcheck

[Markus Sabin]

Hi all,

today I have received an evaluation copy of dcmckeck. For a quick test, I checked a Secondary Capture Object with veterinary attributes. I suppose that as the tool itself, its built in Data Dictionary is from 2003. So e.g. the output contains messages like this:

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Informational I-06: Attribute is not needed.
   Affected attribute: (0010,2297) PN [Howard^Charles^Stewart]                 #  22, 1 Unknown Tag & Data

So I tried to load a recent dicom.dic from dcmtk 3.6.2 by specifying the DCMDICTPATH environment variable. However, dcmcheck apparently stumbles across the new VRs introduced since 2003:

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DcmDataDictionary: d:\Data\SVN\external\dcmtk-3.6.2\dcmdata\data\dicom.dic: bad VR field (line 164): UC
DcmDataDictionary: d:\Data\SVN\external\dcmtk-3.6.2\dcmdata\data\dicom.dic: bad VR field (line 165): UR
DcmDataDictionary: d:\Data\SVN\external\dcmtk-3.6.2\dcmdata\data\dicom.dic: bad VR field (line 186): UC
DcmDataDictionary: d:\Data\SVN\external\dcmtk-3.6.2\dcmdata\data\dicom.dic: bad VR field (line 187): UC
DcmDataDictionary: d:\Data\SVN\external\dcmtk-3.6.2\dcmdata\data\dicom.dic: bad VR field (line 227): UR
DcmDataDictionary: d:\Data\SVN\external\dcmtk-3.6.2\dcmdata\data\dicom.dic: bad VR field (line 298): UC
DcmDataDictionary: d:\Data\SVN\external\dcmtk-3.6.2\dcmdata\data\dicom.dic: bad VR field (line 307): UC
DcmDataDictionary: d:\Data\SVN\external\dcmtk-3.6.2\dcmdata\data\dicom.dic: bad VR field (line 1284): UC
DcmDataDictionary: d:\Data\SVN\external\dcmtk-3.6.2\dcmdata\data\dicom.dic: bad VR field (line 1286): UC
DcmDataDictionary: d:\Data\SVN\external\dcmtk-3.6.2\dcmdata\data\dicom.dic: bad VR field (line 1843): UR
DcmDataDictionary: d:\Data\SVN\external\dcmtk-3.6.2\dcmdata\data\dicom.dic: bad VR field (line 2078): UR
DcmDataDictionary: d:\Data\SVN\external\dcmtk-3.6.2\dcmdata\data\dicom.dic: bad VR field (line 2155): UR
DcmDataDictionary: d:\Data\SVN\external\dcmtk-3.6.2\dcmdata\data\dicom.dic: bad VR field (line 2493): OL
DcmDataDictionary: d:\Data\SVN\external\dcmtk-3.6.2\dcmdata\data\dicom.dic: bad VR field (line 2494): OL
DcmDataDictionary: d:\Data\SVN\external\dcmtk-3.6.2\dcmdata\data\dicom.dic: bad VR field (line 2495): OL
DcmDataDictionary: d:\Data\SVN\external\dcmtk-3.6.2\dcmdata\data\dicom.dic: bad VR field (line 2496): OL
DcmDataDictionary: d:\Data\SVN\external\dcmtk-3.6.2\dcmdata\data\dicom.dic: bad VR field (line 2508): OL
DcmDataDictionary: d:\Data\SVN\external\dcmtk-3.6.2\dcmdata\data\dicom.dic: bad VR field (line 2717): OD
DcmDataDictionary: d:\Data\SVN\external\dcmtk-3.6.2\dcmdata\data\dicom.dic: bad VR field (line 2750): OD
DcmDataDictionary: d:\Data\SVN\external\dcmtk-3.6.2\dcmdata\data\dicom.dic: bad VR field (line 2808): UC
DcmDataDictionary: d:\Data\SVN\external\dcmtk-3.6.2\dcmdata\data\dicom.dic: bad VR field (line 2810): UR
DcmDataDictionary: d:\Data\SVN\external\dcmtk-3.6.2\dcmdata\data\dicom.dic: bad VR field (line 2812): OD
DcmDataDictionary: d:\Data\SVN\external\dcmtk-3.6.2\dcmdata\data\dicom.dic: bad VR field (line 2814): OL
DcmDataDictionary: d:\Data\SVN\external\dcmtk-3.6.2\dcmdata\data\dicom.dic: bad VR field (line 2892): UR
DcmDataDictionary: d:\Data\SVN\external\dcmtk-3.6.2\dcmdata\data\dicom.dic: bad VR field (line 3878): OD

With this dictionary the check of the file is not performed, probably due to this error:

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dcmcheck parser: attribute 'CodeSetExtensionFlag' unknown. in iods/macros/codeseq.mac at line 91
dcmcheck: parse error in iod definition: d:\tools\dcmcheck\iods/sc.iod

Is there any way to solve this issue? Would it be worth a try to delete the "offending" lines from the dicom.dic?

Best Regards,

Markus

[Marco Eichelberg]

Exactly. DCMCHECK 2.0 is based on DCMTK 3.5.2 and does not yet know about VRs like UC, UR or OL.
If you remove these tags from the data dictionary, this will be one step forward.

There is one more thing you will have to do: DCMCHECK checks if the readable attribute names
in its script files are consistent with these in dicom.dic. This means that you will receive an error
message whenever a DICOM attribute has been renamed in a more recent version of dicom.dic
than the one shipped with DCMCHECK. You can either change the name in dicom.dic, or in
DCMCHECK's scripts, but it's a somewhat ugly piece of work. This is probably the reason for
the error about CodeSetExtensionFlag being unknown.

[Markus Sabin]

Thanks a lot! We will try that and post the results here.