Full disclosure: I am the CEO of Innolitics, a development firm that specializes in medical imaging applications.

The most authoritative source on DICOM is the free standard:

https://www.dicomstandard.org/current/

It is not particularly easy to read and thus not a great starting place.

The DICOM forum is a good place to ask questions:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/comp.protocols.dicom

David Clunie, a very nice guy and the editor of the DICOM standard, is active on this forum. He also has is own website that has many other links:

https://www.dclunie.com

If you are interested in parsing or generating DICOM files, our DICOM standard browser is a great resource:

https://dicom.innolitics.com/ciods

I also wrote a very brief article about DICOM, which was meant to be the first in a series of articles, but alas I have been to busy to continue them:

https://innolitics.com/articles/dicom-i-facilitating-interop...

Oh, and here is a pretty good blog about DICOM:

http://dicomiseasy.blogspot.com

Checkout his "DICOM Tutorial" in the sidebar.

If you have any particular questions about DICOM, message me and I would be happy to try and answer them.

I've used the Innolitics standard browser in the past and can attest to this browser as a very helpful reference. Of the options available, this has been the most pleasant to work with while also linking to the spec. for that occasional deep dive.

Thank you for the kind words! We appreciate it, and it is nice to hear that people find it to be useful.

We just added a new feature yesterday---it is a new tab that allows you to analyze a DICOM file within the browser, see the values it contains, and easily cross check the tags with the standard. Any feedback would be welcome.

Here is a screenshot of the DICOM file analysis feature in action:

https://innolitics.com/img/dicom-file-upload.png

Edit: make it clear the files are not uploaded to any server, but stay within the browser

Great work as always!

I use Innolitics's DICOM browser for looking up tags every day. :) Thank you :)

I use your DICOM standard browser routinely. Thanks for maintaining it.

I'm glad to hear it is useful! Our mission at Innolitics is:

> To accelerate progress in medical imaging by sharing knowledge, creating tools, and providing quality services to our clients, with the ultimate purpose of improving patient health. We do so while providing meaningful, flexible, and financially rewarding careers to our team.

So it is nice to hear that, to some degree, we are accomplishing the "creating tools" part of this.

Please do let us know if you have ideas for improvements.

likewise, I'm a huge fan of innolitics and their dicom browser. It's awesome and has helped me a lot!

Thanks! Lots to learn here.

Read the standard. There truly is no way around it if you need to perform actual "real" work with DICOM. You need to become familiar with the vocabulary. Also get a copy of [0]. Write a small C program that outputs whether a file is in DICOM format or not (don't do extensive validation, but learn enough to know what to look for). Will you be doing networking? If so, read the standard. Use Wireshark. Look up the DUL state machine and read some library's net code (e.g. pynetdicom).

[0]: https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9783642108495

At a past company, we used https://brainbrowser.cbrain.mcgill.ca, which may come in help to you.

On GitHub click the tags for this project. You can observe other projects' pages, docs, and code to learn more.

I've always found this book to be a good starting place: https://www.amazon.com/Digital-Imaging-Communications-Medici...