General
(0008,0005)
Specific Character Set
Keyword: SpecificCharacterSet
Character Set that expands or replaces the Default Character Repertoire used in the dataset. Required when non-ASCII characters are present.
Tag Attributes
- Tag ID
- (0008,0005)
- Compact
- 00080005
- Keyword
- SpecificCharacterSet
- VR
- CS — Code String
- VM
- 1-n
- Retired
- No
Module(s)
General Series ModuleGeneral Study Module
Engineering Notes
Critical for international deployments. Without this tag, non-ASCII characters (accented names, CJK characters) corrupt patient names and descriptions.
Troubleshooting
Garbled patient names in PACS usually mean a missing or wrong Specific Character Set. Confirm the modality is configured for the correct encoding and the PACS accepts it.
Common Values
| Value | Meaning |
|---|---|
| ISO_IR 6 | Default — ASCII |
| ISO_IR 100 | Latin-1 (Western European) |
| ISO_IR 144 | Cyrillic |
| ISO_IR 166 | Thai |
| ISO_IR 192 | Unicode (UTF-8) |
| GB18030 | Chinese simplified |