I have a funny (or sad, really) DICOM story. I wrote my own DICOM parser in Rust, and I kept encountering a bug where the parsing would fail on a small subset of files in my database.

What you need to know is that DICOM tags have 16-bit group and element values that uniquely identify what the tag contains, and tags that begin with the group 0xfffe are very special, comprising a small set of field delimiters.

Well, the brilliant minds at Codonics decided to use the special group 0xfffe for their private, vendor-specific fields at the end of the file. When parsing a file those private fields would look like delimiters and ruin the logic.

So because of that one particular vendor, I have to check both the group and element of every special tag in every file I parse to make sure it isn't one of their special ones. Whereas, if they had followed the standard, I would only need to check the groups for the value 0xfffe. Thanks, guys!