Feature request

[Simon Doran]

Kevin,

  Here's a feature that should be really easy to implement, but would aid us enormously.

  When performing (pseudo) anonymisations, our worst nightmare is that we lose the "key" that allows us to trace the data. We would normally have one or more physical copies of a document that relates the patient ID on the database to the real patient name. This would take the form of a simple two column list on paper in a locked filing cabinet, to be used in extremis. At present, producing this requires me to type in the original name and the anonymised patient ID that has replaced it every time I run the DicomBrowser anonymisation script. This has the potential for human error!

  What I would really like would be for DicomBrowser to keep a log of what replacements to the patient name field it has performed on a cumulative basis. I would then query this log, compile my table and delete the log.

  Is there any possibility of doing something like this?

Simon

[Archie, Kevin]

Hi, Simon,

If you're always doing this from a script, then you might just add an 'echo' command to the relevant lines in the script and capture stdout. That won't help for changes that are made manually in the GUI though. I'll add it to the issues tracker (and try to get to it soonish).

- Kevin

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[Simon Doran]

Kevin,

That's great. I hadn't realised you could use echo in das scripts!

> That won't help for changes that are made manually in the GUI though.

The only case I need to capture what is done in the UI is when the script can't handle a dataset because the source DICOM didn't have the required information to create a valid patient or session ID. In this case, we have to put something in by hand and will need to capture it.

Simon

[Archie, Kevin]

Simon,

 

Oops, sorry, even the J Digit Imaging paper doesn’t mention echo. I really need to collect all the documentation into one place and fill in the holes sometime soon.

 

Echo is an operator (not a function) that allows you to display any value:

 

echo “hello, world!”

 

echo myVariable

 

echo (0008,1030)

 

Again we get into scoping: echo only executes once per script application, so if the value expression evaluates to different values for different files, the output will be a comma-separated list (DicomBrowser) or one value picked arbitrarily (XNAT upload applet). I’ll have to think about how variable scoping (still not implemented) might interact with echo.

 

-          Kevin