Orthanc identifiers

In Orthanc, each patient, study, series and instance is assigned with an unique identifier that is derived from the DICOM identifiers. Contrarily to the identifiers of the DICOM standard, the Orthanc identifiers are formatted as a SHA-1 hash with a fixed length, so as to be more Web-friendly. More specifically:

  • Patients are identified as the SHA-1 hash of their PatientID tag (0010,0020).

  • Studies are identified as the SHA-1 hash of the concatenation of their PatientID tag (0010,0020) and their StudyInstanceUID tag (0020,000d).

  • Series are identified as the SHA-1 hash of the concatenation of their PatientID tag (0010,0020), their StudyInstanceUID tag (0020,000d) and their SeriesInstanceUID tag (0020,000e).

  • Instances are identified as the SHA-1 hash of the concatenation of their PatientID tag (0010,0020), their StudyInstanceUID tag (0020,000d), their SeriesInstanceUID tag (0020,000e), and their SOPInstanceUID tag (0008,0018).

NB: The concatenation adds a pipe separator “|” between the concatenated DICOM tags.

Because the DICOM standard guarantees the StudyInstanceUID, SeriesInstanceUID and SOPInstanceUID tags to be globally unique, the Orthanc identifiers for studies, series and instances are also globally unique (provided no hash collision occurs, which is highly improbable).

The patient-level identifiers are not guaranteed to be globally unique, and might collide between different hospitals. For this reason, you should always do queries at the study level as soon as you deal with an application that handles patients from different hospitals.

The actual implementation of the hashing is carried on by the DicomInstanceHasher class.

If two different instances have the same Orthanc identifier, only one of them is kept. By default, the first instance that was received by Orthanc is kept. You can choose to replace the first instance by the second instance by setting configuration option OverwriteInstances to true.

The “Inexistent Tag” error

If you use an old version of Orthanc (< 0.7.4) and you receive the “Exception while storing DICOM: Inexistent tag” error while storing a DICOM instance into Orthanc, please make sure that all the 4 following tags do exist in the DICOM file:

  • PatientID (0010,0020),

  • StudyInstanceUID (0020,000d),

  • SeriesInstanceUID (0020,000e),

  • SOPInstanceUID (0008,0018).

These tags are all used to index the incoming DICOM instances. The error message is more explicit starting with Orthanc 0.7.4.