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Dear Vinod, >Dear SPM Colleagues, > >I have some dicom image files that I would like to convert into SPM >compatible format files. > >I assume I can just write a Matlab routine to open the dicom files and >grab the header information and write it out in a separate file. The >question is, where in the dicom file is this header information contained? > The general organisation of the DICOM file format is as follows. The information of any kind is aggregated into "groups" in which there are "members". So if you for example want to find the patient name that will be stored in the "patient" group as the "name" member. Groups and members are coded as numbers so that the group number for patient may for example be 8 and the member number for name may for example be 30 (please note that I don't remember the actual numbers so these examples will be wrong). Now when reading a DICOM file you will read four numbers (I think) that specify group, member, type (e.g. integer) and size. You then check if group and member correspond with the information you need. If it does you will decode it using the type field, if not you will skip size bytes forward to the next field. This structure has the advantage that you may write a short utility to read precisely the information you are interested in (typically less than ten items) without having to bother about the other information in there. For more specific information you may refer to the DICOM specification document, which is just awful to read. You may alternatively use the ACR-NEMA 2.0 specification, which I found a lot more digestable, of which DICOM is simply a superset. However, my first recommnedation would be to visit David Clunies home page http://idt.net /~dclunie/medical-image-faq/html/ which contains pretty much any information you are ever going to need regarding medical image formats. I should guess also that you will find some utility there to do what you want to do. Good luck Jesper %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%