Renaming Scan objects after uploading

[Guus Kolpa]

Hi all,

Many thanks for your work, XNAT has looked very promising for our use and as such I hope I can overcome this issue:

We're importing many different DICOM series from a lot of studies and patients. To this end we use the DICOM import service of the API to upload a zipped folder. So far, it looks good:

This is easily navigatable. However, when we download, the ZIP file uses the ScanID as a naming scheme:

Which makes it very hard for end-users to understand what series they are dealing with when they want to process data. 

I know the ScanID comes from the SeriesNumber (or SeriesInstanceUID in its absence). However, I'd like to change this to something more human-readable.

I've tried: 

PUT http://localhost:8080/xnat/data/projects/tst/subjects/S00026/experiments/XNAT_E00026/scans/1?xnat:mrScanData/ID=localizer_trufi_2D

but this only creates a new empty Scan object.

Are there ways to rename scans through the REST API or provide a field to use during upload? If you don't see a way, do you have any other suggestions on how to tackle this problem?

For me this quite heavily hampers end-user usability so I hope you could help me. 

Some extra information:

XNAT v1.8.5

Operating on Ubuntu 20.04

PostgresQL v10

Your help is much appreciated!

Kind regards,

Guus

[Charlie Moore]

Hi Guus,

The scan ID is immutable in XNAT, so there isn't a REST call to change it. It's also unfortunately not configurable for which DICOM element it will be extracted from. As a workaround for the issue you're having though, have you tried unchecking the "Simplify downloaded archive structure" checkbox on the download launcher? That should cause the downloaded file paths to include the scan ID plus the series description.

Thanks,

Charlie Moore

[Guus Kolpa]

Hi Charlie, 

Thanks for the quick answer.

Rough to hear that the scan ID can't be changed during DICOM imports, but I understand why it makes sense on the back-end to avoid conflicts.

Thanks for the advice on the checkbox, I also noticed that downloading through the API defaults to this id + series description, so I think I'll just make sure with my users to not use that checkbox. Do you know if it's possible to change the default behaviour of the "Simplify" checkbox to be off, without changing the internal XNAT code as I'd rather not deviate from a standard install besides plugins?

Thanks again,

[Charlie Moore]

Hi Guus,

Sorry for another "no", but that is also not really configurable as far as I'm aware.

Thanks,

Charlie Moore