'Contactless' custom dicom routing rules e.g. for QA scans

[John McLean]

Dear XNAT folks, 

I'd like to create a 'contactless' rule for dicom routing for specific projects in our XNAT instance. By contactless, i mean, no technologist or radiographer input/editing of the dicom fields is required. My initial thought was to label a protocol with project and subject information in a dicom field that will not change and then to use a custom rule for the session label, ideally where the date and timestamp of the scan becomes the session id. The idea behind this is to make acquiring our MR QA data as simple and error free as possible. 

I have read through the pages below: 

https://wiki.xnat.org/documentation/how-to-use-xnat/image-session-upload-methods-in-xnat/how-xnat-scans-dicom-to-map-to-project-subject-session

https://wiki.xnat.org/documentation/xnat-administration/xnat-custom-dicom-routing-rules-in-the-admin-ui

But I'm not convinced I can achieve my goal within the custom rules in the admin UI. Some specific questions as follows.

Can I attribute just the custom session rule for a specific project or will the session rule be enacted for every project? I thought because i am only using a custom rule for the session id that this might be ok but on reading the documentation, my interpretation is that the custom rule (being the first rule) at the session level would trump the session rules for all projects, which is not what i want.   

Can I use the Regular expression logic (anyhow) to pull out the dicom date/timestamp and use that as the session id input ? 

I haven't done any trial and error yet of pushing data through with custom rules, as my reading of the documentation is that I might not be approaching this problem in the best way, but I thought this is something someone might have tackled already? Here's hoping, any advice very welcome.

Thanks

John McLean 

[Herrick, Rick]

The question is what distinguishes data that’s intended for the project(s) where you want to use this naming logic from data that’s intended for other projects? Without knowing that it’s hard to say if this is doable with the custom routing features.

 

The biggest issue is that, as best I can tell (it’s been QUITE a while since I’ve messed with this functionality, so I may be wrong on this), you can’t use the value of one tag when evaluating/expanding another. Say you want a rule something like:

 

“If the project found in StudyDescription is A, then if PatientID matches ^Session: (.*)$ use capture group 1 as the session label.”

 

That doesn’t work because the custom rule implementation only looks at a single tag at a time.

 

DicomEdit can do this sort of thing, though, something like:

 

(0008,1030) == "A" ? session := format["{0} {1}", StudyDate, StudyTime]

 

Outside of that, my first impulse would be to write a custom DICOM object identifier implementation that does exactly what you want (including handling the conditionals) then assign that to the DICOM receiver where this data will be sent. But I spend all day every day writing Java code in XNAT, so it’s probably not too surprising that that’s my first impulse 😊

 

-- 

Rick Herrick

XNAT Architect/Developer

Computational Imaging Laboratory

Washington University School of Medicine

 

 

From: xnat_di...@googlegroups.com <xnat_di...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of John McLean <johnmc...@gmail.com>
Date: Tuesday, November 16, 2021 at 9:40 AM
To: xnat_discussion <xnat_di...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: [XNAT Discussion] 'Contactless' custom dicom routing rules e.g. for QA scans

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[Moore, Charlie]

Hi John,

I would also echo making a DICOM object identifier to implement the behavior you want. The custom routing rules are indeed only available sitewide. Additionally, project IDs or subject/session labels can only be pulled from one DICOM element (so grabbing Study Date & Study Time isn't possible).

Thanks,

Charlie

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From: xnat_di...@googlegroups.com <xnat_di...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Herrick, Rick <jrhe...@wustl.edu>
Sent: Tuesday, November 16, 2021 10:29 AM
To: xnat_di...@googlegroups.com <xnat_di...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: [XNAT Discussion] 'Contactless' custom dicom routing rules e.g. for QA scans

 

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[John McLean]

Hi,

Sorry to only come back to this now. Thanks Rick and Charlie for comments. In terms of getting started with a custom Dicom object identifier, is any more information available? i notice there is a space pending here : 

https://wiki.xnat.org/documentation/xnat-administration/connecting-xnat-to-dicom-scanners-and-pacs/custom-dicom-object-identifiers

Would this need to be deployed via a plugin or is it possible to create a custom dicom object identifier without the overhead of a plugin? (i'm guessing that might depend on the nature of the custom identifier?) 

Thanks again

John Mc