DICOM de-identification tool overview

Specific use cases and requirements for de-identification

Requirements

• Client side processing
• Offline processing
• Platform and browser independent
• Provided as commandline tool?
• In-application processing should be possible?
  • e.g. in MITK and Slicer?
• Specify conditions like if tag value is equal to XYZ then remove all private tags except of <tag list>

Some issues, which anonymization tools often have, found on the Plastimatch homepage, also providing a comparison:

• Some date fields cannot be changed (duh)
• It is not possible to preserve relative dates (for example, we would like to set StudyDate to Jan 1, 2000, but preserve the fact that StructureSetDate occurred 35 days later)
• Private tags are always deleted (on our GE scanner, these contain important acquisition details)
• Comments, diagnosis descriptions, or other fields cannot be reset (may contain protected information)
• It is not possible to modify strings (for example, the physician might type “smith-final” into the StructureSetName field, and we would like to delete “smith” but preserve “final” )
• UIDs are not changed, or relationships between UIDs are not preserved (duh)

Available tools for DICOM de-identification

Toolname	Language	Available as cmd line?	Features	URL
Clinical Trial Processor	Java			http://mircwiki.rsna.org/index.php?title=CTP-The_RSNA_Clinical_Trial_Processor
DICOM Cleaner	Java			http://www.dclunie.com/pixelmed/software/webstart/DicomCleanerUsage.html
DICOM Confidential	Java			http://sourceforge.net/projects/privacyguard/
DICOM Browser	Java	Yes	Script based processing: Assignment / Deletion / Constraint and condition based / Built-in functions / Generators / user defined variables	http://nrg.wustl.edu/software/dicom-browser/
GDCM Anon	C++	Yes		http://gdcm.sourceforge.net/html/gdcmanon.html
DCMTK	C++
DICOM anon	Python	Yes		https://github.com/cbmi/dicom-anon