I'm in the process of anonymizing our dicom metadata, and The Powers That Be have determined that the date of an MRI scan is a HIPAA identifier. Our Siemens dicoms have a field "FrameOfReferenceUID" which I understand can be useful in determining the spatial relationship of images. Unfortunately, the field contains the procedure date and time embedded within the string (e.g. '1.3.12.2.1107.5.2.30.27854.1.YYYMMDDHHMMSS000.0.0.0'). I was wondering whether this field is used in the dicom to nifti conversion process? And if so, would any harm come of selectively zeroing out the bolded portion of the field?

I've attempted a conversion of dicoms with that particular field wiped, and no problems seemed to occur.