DQR error on series with too-many-carets in tag

[eloc...@gmail.com]

Hello all,

We've pinned down an issue we've been having with DQR searches using the plugin. The referring physician tag (0018, ) from a particular scanner unfortunately inserts too many carets in the string with the doctor's name. This causes an error when we do a search for the patient's data, both through the XNAT web interface or through CSV REST query. The XNAT will say that no data was found for the patient on the remote PACS, even though there are multiple series available. As far as we can tell, we only run into this issue when there are 3+ consecutive carets in a tag in the response from PACS. Usually, our queries run without any problem.

We checked the packets returned from the remote PACS to verify the response to XNAT contained a valid response. I've attached screenshots of the query and response contents (with sensitive info scrubbed).

The error from the dqr.log will read something like: (dummy physician name inserted)

2023-01-13 10:50:08,944 [http-nio-8080-exec-5] ERROR org.nrg.xnatx.dqr.services.impl.basic.BasicDicomQueryRetrieveService - The submitted PACS query criteria were invalid
org.nrg.xapi.exceptions.DataFormatException: A DQR run-time exception occurred, which usually indicates a problem performing a query to the PACS: SMITH^JOHN^^^^MD

I've tried the 1.0.4-SNAPSHOT DQR plugin, but it does not fix the problem.

Has anyone else encountered this issue? Please let us know if we can clarify or test anything further.

Thanks,

Eve

Query out from XNAT to PACS:

Query returned from PACS:

[eloc...@gmail.com]

Quick correction: To clarify tag address, the problem lies with 

(0008,0090) Referring Physician’s Name

Thanks,

Eve

[Charlie Moore]

Hi Eve,

That is not a valid value for a person name [VR of PN] element. There are only permitted to be a maximum of 4 carets [for a component group], and your examples have 5. That can be found in the description of the PN VR here: https://dicom.nema.org/medical/dicom/current/output/chtml/part05/sect_6.2.html .

"Any of the five components may be an empty string. The component delimiter shall be the caret "^" character (5EH). There shall be no more than four component delimiters, i.e., none after the last component if all components are present."

Thanks,

Charlie Moore

[eloc...@gmail.com]

Hi Charlie, that's pretty helpful, thanks for letting us know the specifics about the tag definition. Clearly not a problem with the plugin! 

Cheers,

Eve