Overlay data in high bits of PixelData

[howff]

Hello. Does pydicom handle overlay data held in the high bits of the PixelData?
This is an old (deprecated) method of storing overlays but many images exist in this format.
See Overlay Bit Position Attribute.
I've looked through the source code but I can't find any reference to this.

[mrbean-bremen]

Pydicom does no image processing itself. The decompression of image data is done by third-party libraries, and apart from providing helper functions for applying modality and VOI LUT, there is no handling of the image data itself in pydicom.
As you wrote, overlay bits are long deprecated, so I don't think it makes sense to add the respective functionality. If someone wants to share related code, it would probably be best suited for contrib-pydicom.

Using numpy, it should not be too difficult to extract the overlay data from pixel_array and mask it out for the actual data.

[howff]

There is some discussion and sample code available here: pydicom/deid#201