Secondary Capture Image: what is the correct workflow for creating and storing?

Question

I need to create a Secondary Capture Image representing a report related to radiopharmaceutical and dose injected to the patient during the medical examination. I know Secondary Capture Image is not the right choice to accomplish the task but that is what the customer requires.

Following are the steps I thought to implement for developing the feature and I would like to read some opinions or suggestion from the community.

Assumption: MWL is implemented and the Study Instance UID is generated in the RIS

1. query the MWL (C-FIND) to get the requested procedure object
2. parse the result to get the StudyInstanceUID and patient related informations (name, sex, birthdate etc.)
3. query (C –FIND) the modality looking for the specific Study Instance UID
4. parse the result to get the Series Instance UID
5. create the image setting the three mandatory attribute Study Instance UID, Series Instance UID, Modality (together with some type 2 attributes I got querying MWL and modality in the previous steps)
6. C-STORE to persist the image to the storage archive
7. Commit of the image (do I really need?)

I really appreciate comments opinions or someone that can address me to a more solid architecture.

Answer 1

1. correct
2. correct. Do not forget about attributes that are not so obvious like Admission ID, Accession Number, Referring Physicians Name and others.
3. The majority of modalities does not support Query/Retrieve as an SCP. If you would really need to query for the images, send the C-FIND to the PACS rather than the modality. The Study Instance UID comes with the worklist. Even if the UID you find by Query differs from that, I would strongly recommend to use the one from the worklist. However, I do not see any sense in using attributes from other sources than the MWL and your own "acquisition".
4. Why would you want to add the image to an existing series? It would probably be more appropriate to create a new one. There are a lot of reasons for that, e.g. Modality and vendor/equipment information are series level information and probably different.
5. There are more mandatory attributes for SC (e.g. in the general image module). Not all come from the MWL.
6. yes.

7. You do not have to. However, suppose that your images are lost:

   a) you have received a storage commitment from the PACS -> blame on the PACS

   b) you have not received a storage commitment from the PACS -> blame on ...? ;-)