Enhanced not classic

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1

Hi,

General question about converting DICOM data that has been exported as classic rather than enhanced DICOM.

I’ve been given some data that was acquired on a Siemens Prisma running XA30, I’m converting it using dcm2bids. The data are multi-echo functional, but we’ll deal with that later!

I’m getting the warning:

Warning: 4D Siemens XA images should be exported as enhanced not classic DICOM. Slice times and other properties may be inaccurate.

But without the option of jumping in a delorean/tardis I think I’m probably stuck with the data as they are.

What are the consequences of proceeding with the data as-is? Is the slice timing data really inaccurate? What are the options if someone wanted to slice time correct? This seems to be part of the optimally combining process/tedana pipeline.

Would restoring the data to the scanner and re-exporting work? Or has the header information been lost forever. I really don’t want to have to restore the data.

Any help/suggestions would be most welcome.

Cheers, Jon

2

Does the kludge (fix) mentioned here mean that this isn’t a problem?

Best wishes,
Jon

3

When converting enhanced DICOM data (obtained from here) using dcm2niix v1.0.20250505 you still get

Warning: 4D Siemens XA images should be exported as enhanced not classic DICOM. Slice times and other properties may be inaccurate.

the message is just to remind XA30 users about the potential for issues if not exporting correctly.

Hope this helps.

Cheers, Jon

5

For XA10 and XA11, the classic is very impoverished relative to enhanced. With XA20 and later, the classic has a lot of the required information, and may be equivalent to enhanced. However, I do not have access to XA hardware, and have only seen a very limited number of classic sequences, so I am not confident in the conversion. THere are XA30 validation datasets using the same sequences for classic/interpoperability and enhanced. If you do use classic, be mindful that the dcm2niix developers had very minimal validation datasets, so be cautious. dcm2niix generates warnings when some uncertainty exists.