DICOM already provides a unique enough identifier for the Series (e.g. Series Instance UID
), so why also include one on the lower level objects (e.g. SOPInstanceUID
)?
What I find really annoying is the fact that when referencing other objects - for example when RTPlan
object references RTStruct
object via ReferencedStructureSetSequence
/ ReferencedSOPInstanceUID
- it's done using the SOP Instance UID
. However any of the DICOM SCPs - such as find/move - don't work with SOP Instance UID
, they work with the Series Instance UID
. So what gives? Do I have to load the whole Series
to find all the referenced objects?
This question was from quite a while ago, but I thought I'd add that, ignoring QR
altogether, a SeriesInstanceUID
is a globally unique identifier for a single series. SOPInstanceUID
is a globally unique identifier for a DICOM
file. A series can have multiple DICOM
files, so each would share that same SeriesInstanceUID
, but each file would have it's own SOPInstanceUID
.