Reading and writing DICOM files

Common pydicom functions called by user code

File Reading/Parsing

The main function to read and parse DICOM files using pydicom is dcmread(). It’s part of the pydicom.filereader module, but is also imported when the pydicom package is imported

>>> import pydicom
>>> dataset = pydicom.dcmread('path/to/file')

If you need fine control over the reading, you can either call read_partial() or use dcmread().

File Writing

DICOM files can also be written using pydicom. There are two ways to do this.

• The first is to use dcmwrite() with a prexisting FileDataset (derived from Dataset) instance.

• The second is to use the Dataset.save_as() method on a FileDataset or Dataset instance.