Recipe Functions

The recipe headers page taught you how to write a recipe that has one or more commands to parse a dicom image header. For example, we might have defined a custom function per the example here to replace patient info with a result from our custom function:

%header

REPLACE fields:patient_info func:generate_uid

As of version 0.2.3 of deid, we have packaged functions along with deid that you can use without needing to write your own! Current functions are provided for:

generating unique identifiers
jittering
let us know if you want to contribute or request a new function!

The current offerings include the following:

Name	Description	Extra Params
`simple_uuid`	Modify with a simple `uuid.uuid4()` string	None
`dicom_uuid`	A more formal dicom uid that requires an org root	org_root
`suffix_uuid`	Make the value the field name with a `uuid.uuid4()` suffix.	None
`jitter`	The same as JITTER (grandfathered in)	days

A Simple UUID

For a simple example, let’s replace the recipe above with the deid provided “simple_uuid” function, which is simply going to replace the field of our choice with a uuid.uuid4() string in Python. That would look like this:

%header

REPLACE fields:patient_info deid_func:simple_uuid

The only change is that we replaced func with deid_func. Deid will see this function is provided in its library, and grab it for use.

A Pydicom UUID

Pydicom provides a function to generate a UUID and for most this is likely a good approach to take. The most basic usage (for one run) is to generate a random valid unique identifier:

%header

REPLACE ReferringPhysicianName deid_func:pydicom_uuid

The default uses stable_remapping=true, which means we use the original UUID as entropy to be able to consistently return the same value between runs. You can disable it, however we do not recommended it (but maybe could be appropriate for your use case).

You can also optionally define a custom prefix. Note that it needs to match the regular expression ^(0|[1-9][0-9]*)(\\.(0|[1-9][0-9]*))*\\.$ which (in spoken terms) is a number followed by a period, another number, and ending also in a period (e.g, 1.55.).

%header

REPLACE ReferringPhysicianName deid_func:pydicom_uuid prefix=1.55.

A Dicom UUID

A more “formal” uuid function was added that requires an organization root. Your organization should have it’s own - for example the PYMEDPHYS_ROOT_UID is “1.2.826.0.1.3680043.10.188” so we might do:

%header

REPLACE fields:patient_info deid_func:dicom_uuid org_root=1.2.826.0.1.3680043.10.188

Notice how we’ve provided an extra argument, org_root to be parsed. If you don’t provide one an anonymous-organization will be used, which isn’t technically an organization root.

A UUID Suffix

If you simply want to take the current field and add a suffix to it as the value:

%header

REPLACE fields:patient_info deid_func:suffix_uuid

This would make a final value that looks something like patient_into-5897bd32-b4f3-4bda-9dc5-2d29e5688ea1

Jitter

Jitter is intended for datetime fields, and technically you can just use the JITTER function provided natively in the recipe. We decided to include it here to add further customization. For example, you can provide variables for both days and years for a more fine-tuned jitter. We also wanted to add it here because technically it is a custom action. A jitter (as a custom deid function) might look like this:

%header

REPLACE fields:AcquisitionDate deid_func:jitter days=1

or some number of years and days:

%header

REPLACE fields:AcquisitionDate deid_func:jitter days=1 years=1

And that’s it! If you want to request or contribute a custom (deid provided) function, please open an issue.

User Documentation