Hi Haleh Khoshkhouy Delshad , which software package are you using? Do you need those parameters to perform unwarping?

Dr. Delshad,

DICOM headers are defined to be flexible based on the imaging modality and scanner details. Teasing apart the header can be a tedious exercise without external input. A reasonable technique is to rely on the efforts of others in the medical imaging community for some leading details. One technique is to use a commercial vendors DICOM viewer package to yield the details in a readable format then return to Matlab to find matching numerical values to get the appropriate DICOM header code to search. I recommend using something like RadiAnt or Horos to get the values you seek and then return to your Matlab code to search the values out. If you are performing field maps you will need to get the look up table for intensity values or scaling factors from absolute intensity on the scanner to the signal strenght at the value of the pixel. If your manufacturer does not supply that in DICOM images you will have to produce a relative scale based on SNR measurements in the image.

I hope this helps in your research.

Sincerely,

Doug Morris

Can you upload an example dicom-file? I will take a look, and maybe the information you need is actually contained in the header. That would be nice!

The EPI inter-echo spacing and the sequence echo time are contained in DICOM headers for packaged sequences on major vendor MRI scanners. You will be able to find the appropriate timing in the header. Pull the echo times from the scanner display and then search for that number in your header. That will give you the parameter label use when reading the DICOM headers for this sequence.