DICOM itself has always allowed use of a variety of extended character sets using ISO 2022 standardised encoding, and has recently incorporated also native Unicode (UTF-8) and Chinese GB18030 encodings. DicomObjects allows you to access data in these formats in two ways:
1) By using “standard” access methods (e.g. DicomAttribute Value property), the “raw” data, complete with escape strings, and double byte characters (where used) may be retrieved, and interpreted yourself, in conjunction with the 0008,0005 character set code.
2) By Using the UnicodeValue or UnicodeValue2 method, the strings are interpreted internally into Unicode, for subsequent display etc.
Notes:
DicomObjects relies on the operating system to do the necessary conversions, and support varies between different versions of Windows, but this is not generally an issue on recent versions of Windows.
The Unicode strings may be used directly for constructing DicomLabel objects – e.g. to display a patient’s name over the image. Provided that a suitable font is chosen (one which supports both Unicode and the local character set), then this should work with no further manipulation necessary
Standard GUI objects in VB (and possibly some other languages) do not support Unicode, so names using extended characters will not display correctly in standard text boxes, list boxes, tree controls etc. There are however a number of easy to use replacements in which Unicode has been properly implemented (e.g. UniToolBox ) which solve this problem.
At present, DicomObjects does not support translation of Unicode to DICOM escaped sequences, as there are so many possible ambiguities when converting in this direction. Support for conversion to UTF-8 may be added if requested.
DicomObjects supports all the character sets listed in DICOM as of July 2003, including those in CP252 (March 2003): They are: