iaea human health series publications - SEDIM

8.1. NOTE ON IMAGE NAMING CONVENTIONWhen producing images for QC purposes, it is important that the images can be easily identified andretrieved. In most cases, it is necessary to perform test measurements on images that are in the DICOM ‘forprocessing’ format. It will often be necessary to obtain these images by exporting them from the acquisition unit,since the majority of systems are configured to send the processed (‘for presentation’) images to the PACS. Imageson some acquisition workstations are identified only by their DICOM name, which makes it difficult or impossibleto recognize to which test they correspond. To avoid such difficulties, it is sometimes useful to store each testindividually as a different ‘patient’. Some tests require multiple images to be produced. It is therefore important thatwithin each ‘patient’ test, individual images are also identified (this can be done using radiographic numbers or byrecording the real time of the acquisition image). In other systems the images are stored sequentially, despite thefact that the test has been named, so care has to be taken to avoid analysis of the wrong image. Not all systems storeimages in the DICOM format at the acquisition workstation. To open such images in order to analyse them withother software, the user must know the exact matrix size for each system (see Table 2). Manufacturers areencouraged to provide a method for exporting ‘for processing’ images in the DICOM format [23].Where systems permit sending the unprocessed images directly to the PACS, the images should be identifiedby the PACS as ‘non-patient’ studies. This can be accomplished by adopting a distinctive and meaningful namingconvention. Normally it is most convenient to conduct testing in the same manner as patient imaging would bedone; therefore, it may be helpful to identify QC images in a manner analogous to that used for patients, where afamily name, given name and other ID information must be provided. An optional naming convention that may beconvenient uses ‘Physics’ as the family name, the name of the test as the given name and a unique ‘patient IDnumber’ that contains the date on which the tests were performed; for example, for the AEC thickness trackingtest — last name ‘Physics’, first name ‘Thickness’ and patient ID number ‘9903YYMMDD’. As an alternative, theimages can all be collected as one patient study and analysed in the sequence collected. In this case, the first namecould be ‘Test’.81