Accession Number not coming into PACS

[Bill Lamb]

We have an ultrasound machine that displays the Accession Number when you query the Worklist. When you scan the patient and send the images to the PACS the Accession Number and Description do not come over. What is the reason this is happening?

Thank You,
Bill

[Markus Sabin]

Let me make an educated guess.

Our company offers a consulting service for testing DICOM interfaces. Mainly modality manufacturers are doing this with us. Not transferring the Accession Number from worklist results to acquired images is something that we find in almost every project. It seems that there is a very common misconception of what a DICOM type 2 attribute is.

What it is: "You may leave it empty if you do not know a correct value for it" -> explicitly conveying the information "I do not have that information"
How many implementors read it: "You may leave it empty if you want"

Obviously, when the modality receives the Acc# via worklist, it cannot claim not to have the information, but this seems to be easy to miss.

I would bet one box of finest franconian beer (shipping not included) that it is a bug in the modality. :-) If you would like assistance in verifying and obtaining evidence for this, you are welcome to PM me.

Best Regards,

Markus

[Bill Lamb]

Can you tell me how we can fix the problem. It seems as though it is not using the Study UID from the worklist, but the ultrasound is creating it's own UID, therefore the Accession Number is not coming over.

[Bill Lamb]

The Images are now coming over with the Accession Number since the Manufacturer did a software upgrade to the machine. The images are coming over with a green background and pink images. Is this a Compression issue.

[Bill Lamb]

I changed the compression to uncompressed and the images come over just fine.