Explorer 2 ... Wow! (and on editing patients)

General
1

So, a year ago I figured I wanted to use the connectivity stuff in my ultrasound machine and being a Linux guy I was very happy to find Orthanc. But I gave up after a while. One issue was that characters such as æ, ø and å was being deleted from the files being transferred. And the Explorer interface wasn’t useful enough.

Recently I got the time to wipe the MacOS of an old Mac Pro 2013 and install Debian on it. And since that sits in my office I figured I’d give Orthanc another shot. I got it up and running but the character issue was still there. That seems to be an issue with the software on the ultrasound machine, so I have contacted them and there is apparently a software upgrade coming soon. So, I am hopeful.

Then I started building my own webpage / interface to Orthanc. And down the rabbit hole I went, analyzing the MySql database and figuring out how to query to get patients, studies, series and instances. Didn’t know anything about DICOM tags so it was a steep learning curve and a fair bit of frustration.

After having succeeded and being able to watch my images through my web interface I came across the page in the Orthanc Book where it is discouraged accessing the database directly and rather using the REST API. Oh, well. I learned a lot.

The next step was to create an interface so I could edit the names of the patients that had missing characters and merge two “patients” if there were multiple occurrences of a patient.

I had noticed that there was a version 2 of the Explorer but it didn’t come with the packages and some attempts to install it had failed. I just got it working though and I am so happy with it! Not only does it make it easy to get an overview but it’s possible to edit patients and even to merge them. Awesome stuff !!

Now I am curious. When editing the name of a patient, what would be best practice of these three choices that I am presented with and why?

  1. Modify the original study. (generating new DICOM UIDs)
  2. Modify the original study. (keeping the original DICOM UIDs)
  3. Create a modified copy of the original study. (generating new DICOM UIDs and keeping the original study)

I’m guessing it probably doesn’t matter much since it’s just my stuff and some MRIs and x-rays that I import from files and old CDs. Still I want to do things “correct” as possible.

2

Hello,

Thanks for your feedback!

Regarding your question:
From the DICOM standard, you must generate some new DICOM UIDs as soon as the DICOM files are modified (either the pixel data or the DICOM tags).
So, if you need to be compliant with the standard, you should choose #1 or #3 (#3 if you want to keep the original study as it is).
In some cases, users don’t need to be compliant with the DICOM standard, and want to keep valid some references to the original study, so they choose the #2.

HTH,

1 Like
3

Thanks :slight_smile: