GBK chinese encoding and DICOM

[Smita]

Hi,

Recently while attending a connectivity event in China, I saw a lot of
DICOM RIS and PACS supportig the encoding GBK at the DICOM level.
Meaning that the Specific character set tag(8,5) had the entry GBK and
the strings in the image headers were encoded in GBK. GBK is also a
popular encoding in North China.
The DICOM supported encoding for Chinese are GB18030 and ISO IR
192(Unicode).
GB18030 is a superset of GBK, so even though systems that support
GB18030 and have the capability of understanding GBK, do not accept
DICOM messages with the specific character set tags as "GBK" because
its not in the DICOm standard. This is limiting interconnectivity.

I am not sure why some DICOM RIS and PACS went ahead with GBK encoding
at the DICOM level, but our systems are facing connectivity issues
because we only support the encodings mentioned in the DICOM
standards.

My question is why can GBK not be included in the DICOM standard when
it is so pupular in China.

Thanks
Smita

[David Clunie]

Hi Smita

Quite simply, nobody ever asked the DICOM committee to consider
support of "GBK" rather than or in addition to GB180130.

If you, or anybody else, wants to put in a CP to add support for
GBK (or the earlier GB 2312-1980) please feel free to do so,
or ask one of us to do it.

In the interim, if you would be able to gather some of these
images that have GBK strings in them, I would be interested
in taking a look at them, if you want to email them to me
or can upload them to:

http://idisk.mac.com/dclunie-Public/

Also, just for fun, I modified one of my toolkits to treat
"GBK" and "GB2312" values in (0008,0005) as if they were GB18030,
since the latter is nominally a superset, and you can try it on
your image files at:

http://www.dclunie.com/pixelmed/software/webstart/DicomImageViewer.html

David

Post by Smita
Hi,
Recently while attending a connectivity event in China, I saw a lot of
DICOM RIS and PACS supportig the encoding GBK at the DICOM level.
Meaning that the Specific character set tag(8,5) had the entry GBK and
the strings in the image headers were encoded in GBK. GBK is also a
popular encoding in North China.
The DICOM supported encoding for Chinese are GB18030 and ISO IR
192(Unicode).
GB18030 is a superset of GBK, so even though systems that support
GB18030 and have the capability of understanding GBK, do not accept
DICOM messages with the specific character set tags as "GBK" because
its not in the DICOm standard. This is limiting interconnectivity.
I am not sure why some DICOM RIS and PACS went ahead with GBK encoding
at the DICOM level, but our systems are facing connectivity issues
because we only support the encodings mentioned in the DICOM
standards.
My question is why can GBK not be included in the DICOM standard when
it is so pupular in China.
Thanks
Smita