The primary purpose of populating the Sensitive Content Code Sequence (0008,001D) is to facilitate implementation of associated site policies. Typically, these policies are intended to protect the privacy of the subject and/or protect the sensibilities of people viewing the images.

Example behaviors that might be invoked include:

Such behaviors are not mandated by the Standard.

Implementation of some policies may depend on Storage SCPs providing these attributes as query or return keys. Such SCP support is permitted but not required by the Standard.

The behaviors applied to different types of sensitive images may differ between institutions and regions based on local regulations, policies, implementation capabilities, and configurations. Thus, the same content code may trigger different behaviors in different organizations/contexts.

Implementations should consider how to handle the presence of unrecognized content codes. One approach might be to default to a restrictive policy in such situations (i.e., "fail closed" rather than "fail open")

Ultimately, the logic of deciding which policies and mechanisms to invoke based on the items in the sequence (e.g., applying the most restrictive of the triggered policies, or having newer items supersede older items, or during import coercion to retain older items in the Sensitive Content Code Sequence (0008,001D) or to move older items to the Original Attributes Sequence (0400,0561)) is left to the implementation.