how to spatially order files in a dicom data sequence?

Question

Do the filenames associated with a DICOM image series (from a single scan) match the spatial ordering? What I mean is if the patient was scanned “head first” is 000000.dcm

Answer 1

No, the file names are rarely associated with the spatial ordering.

The best thing to use is the image position (patient) (0020,0032) and image orientation (patient) (0020,0037) values to get the geometry of each image. From there, you can "order" things how you wish, spatially.