Re: Retrieval of private tag

I wanted to store a thumbnail of an image along with the image itself, so I made up a private tag of type binary and used it with the C-Store operation. This worked and I can see the thumbnail in the stored DS (in the CLSrvImg directory of the sample Dicom Server). Now I want to get this thumbnail back, but there seems to be no way to do this other than doing a C-Move operation and fetching the whole image back.

What I'd like to do is just get the thumbnail data (and maybe some other image meta-data) without getting all the pixel data back as well, since if I have to fetch the whole image, there's really not much point in having a thumbnail in the first place. Since some of these images are 2GB in size, you can see why I'd prefer not to do this whole fetch.

Is this possible?

In DICOM standard there is no way to retrieve only the thumbnail or
icon image from an SCP using DIMSE-C C-FIND, C-MOVE, and C-GET. 
Thumbnail image are for previewing the local dataset. As for images on
the server, you need to retrieve the whole dataset to view. We do not
dictate the standard we just implement it. You can join the DICOM
committee and propose to them to implement a way to exchange thumbnail
from the server. The only implementation of viewing thumbnail is in Web
Access to DICOM Persistent Objects (WADO) in the DICOM standard. WADO
and JPEG 2000 part 3 implementation will allow such capabilities but it will not use the standard C-FIND service.


Also, you can use Icon Image Sequence to store the thumbnail along with the image in the dataset.

Yeah, that's what we figured. We'll propose it to the DICOM committee, since what with larger and larger images becoming common, there has to be a way to get meta-data without fetching all the pixel data each time.... I'd at least like to know how big the darned thing is before I commit to fetching 2GB of data....