Private tag name not displayed

[oroy]

Hello,

I use DCMTK version 3.6.1.

I generate DICOM images with the MR storage format (UID 1.2.840.10008.5.1.4.1.1.4) using the little endian explicit transfer syntax (EXS_LittleEndianExplicit).
I add a private group tag to reserve the DICOM tag range (0x0009, 0x0009-0x10FF) and add a couple of private tags in that range in the dictionary by creating DcmDictEntry objects and adding them to the dictionary. In particular, the DcmDictEntry constructor is given the name of the private tag as one of the argument (e.g "My private tag"). To add the private tag to the dataset, I create a DcmTag object, and use the putAndInsertString function to insert its value in the dataset.

When I view the DICOM tags of the generated images using ImageJ, the private tags and their value are present, but the name of the private tags is not displayed (replaced by ----). I would assume that with the explicit transfer syntax, the viewer should be able to get that information from the dictionary. What am I missing?

Thanks for your help,
Olivier

[J. Riesmeier]

Short answer: The name of an attribute is never stored in a DICOM dataset, neither for standard nor private tags. The name is just for human beings, e.g. reading the textual dump of a binary DICOM dataset.
If you want to see the attribute name with ImageJ you should check whether you can add tags to a private dictionary for this software (similar to "private.dic" for the DCMTK).

[oroy]

Thanks, that is all I needed to know.