Follow NEMA PS3.15 E Attribute Confidentiality Profiles (Normative)

[TD-peter]

The DICOM standard defines the following rules:

Confidentiality Profile as a de-identifier shall protect or retain all instances of the Attributes listed in Table E.1-1, whether contained in the main dataset or embedded in an Item of a Sequence of Items. The following action codes are used in the table:

– D – replace with a non-zero length value that may be a dummy value and consistent with the VR
– Z – replace with a zero length value, or a non-zero length value that may be a dummy value and consistent with the VR
– X – remove
– K – keep (unchanged for non-sequence attributes, cleaned for sequences)
– C – clean, that is replace with values of similar meaning known not to contain identifying information and consistent with the VR
– U – replace with a non-zero length UID that is internally consistent within a set of Instances
– Z/D – Z unless D is required to maintain IOD conformance (Type 2 versus Type 1)
– X/Z – X unless Z is required to maintain IOD conformance (Type 3 versus Type 2)
– X/D – X unless D is required to maintain IOD conformance (Type 3 versus Type 1)
– X/Z/D – X unless Z or D is required to maintain IOD conformance (Type 3 versus Type 2 versus Type 1)
– X/Z/U* - X unless Z or replacement of contained instance UIDs (U) is required to maintain IOD conformance (Type 3 versus Type 2 versus Type 1 sequences containing UID references)

However, this tool defines the following method:

    Method      Description                                     Setting Configuration
=====================================================================================
    keep        Retain the value as is.                         No
    redact      Clean the value.                                Yes
    remove      Remove the element.                             No
    perturb     Perturb the value with random noise addition.   Yes
    dateShift   Shift the value using the Date-shift method.    Yes
    cryptoHash  Transform the value using Crypto-hash method.   Yes
    encrypt     Transform the value using Encrypt method.       Yes
    substitute  Substitute the value to a predefined value.     Yes
    refreshUID  replace with a non-zero length UID              No

Unfortunately, there is no direct mapping from the DICOM standard to the different methods. For example, there is no equivalent to the -Z option: "redact" does not replace the value with a zero-length value, but instead replaces it with <null> which is not the same.
It would be very helpful if the tool could implement the full NEMA PS3.15 E Attribute Confidentiality Profiles.