Just a general question about how people have approached managing “outside studies”, the case where a patient brings an exam from an outside institution to be added to Orthanc as an old, prior study.
Ideally, I would prefer to somehow wrap that study using the patient’s local MRN and under a local order or AccessionNumber for the outside study, so that it can be referenced by the local MRN, Patient Data and Order, while keeping the DICOM tags for the outside study so that the MRN, Accesssion, for the actual study are maintained and reflect the data from the outside institution.
Not sure if that is possible, but that would be one approach.
I don’t know if the create-dicom feature can wrap dicom images, or if that is even possible in a way that would preserve the viewing capabilities for dicom images.
Another approach would be to add or edit some of the existing dicom tags before adding to Orthanc (.e.g. OtherPatientID’s, Institution, etc.) or use metatag.
Thanks.
Hi Stephen,
At Osimis, we go for second approach : we edit dicom tags (Accession number, patient ID, patient name,…) in order to make them compliant with local institution rules. We keep “institution name” tag with its original value. You could consider the use of OtherPatientID or something like this if you want to keep original data somewhere.
HTH,
Benoit,
Thanks for the input. I might try that approach and just put something like outsidepatientid | outsideaccession in the OtherPatientID tagvalue, and maybe some other value or scheme to indicate that it is an “outside study”.
I presume that if I change the patientid and accession to a local value that those values will then show up in the image annotations when the study is viewed ? That is the part I don’t like really. It would be better if the original patientid and accession where preserved, but that could cause collissions, although if the OtherPatientID also shows up in the annotations that might be OK also.
What does HTH stand for ? “Hope that Helps” ?