DCMTK

The compression codecs in DCMTK recursively search a DcmDataset instance for all occurances of a PixelData element, and try to apply compression to each element found, even when this is nested within a sequence, e.g. IconImageSequence or some private sequence.

This is OK for the icon image sequence, where the DICOM rules say that it may either be compressed or remain uncompressed, but there are problems sometimes with private sequences. We have received a sample image that contains, in LittleEndianExplicit, a pixel data element that actually contains JPEG data and thus fails compression because there are not sufficient bytes.

It would be good to have an option in all codecs to limit compression/decompression to only the main dataset, and to ignore all other occurances of the PixelData element.