Hi, I am hoping that someone might be able to explain something to me. I am networking images from our CR to Clear Canvas community workstation. When I want to anonymize the study within CC, the window that pops-up always shows an incorrect date of birth - i.e. not what is shown as DOB on the patient in the list, or what was entered originally into the CR software. This causes problems with an incomplete match when sent for teleradiology if this is not corrected for each time. Any idea what might be causing this, or what I can do about it?

Thanks a lot for your time, 

Saskia

 

The idea of anonymizing a study is to modify anything in the dicom data that can be used to identify the patient. It's acting as it should.

What is your goal? Maybe the rename plugin is what you need.

Steve

Ah, thanks Steve, that makes sense.
We are sending cases outside of the country (Uganda) to the USA for teleradiology and they are required to be sent anonymously. Each case is given a unique ID number which is entered into the Patient ID section and then they are cross referenced back to each patient in Ugnada. However, as a random birthdate is then given by CC, when it reaches the USA PACS system it is identified as an 'incorrect match' becasue the image file has a different DOB than what CC has given. So, each time we have to change the DOB back to the correct one so that the receiving PACS can make a match. You are right of course, this does not mean that the case is truly anonymous. I am not sure then how to proceede here. I dont mind that the patient is sent with the correct DOB and no other identifying info, but it is a hassle for staff to have to make this correction every time, and also creates so many errors we have to fix later. I would like to avoid extra plugins and requirements, just becasue it is tiem consuming and I am working in a challenging environment where is it so important that systems stay as simple as possible.

Thanks for your thoughts.

Saskia

Are you comfortable building the Workstation from source? It's a trivial change to edit the Anonymize Study tool to just leave the birth date alone. It sounds like it does what you need, except for this one little quirk.

I guess I don't understand how the PACS in the US does its matching, but can it be changed at all? Seems to me all they need to do is report and give you back results based on that Patient ID you assigned. Why is the birth date even important?

It does otherwise do exactly as I need, just this one quirk. I am not sure what it means to 'build the workstation from source?' I am currently managing the Uganda project from Europe so dont have hands-on access, but can ask locally for technician to help if its necessary.

In any case, I understand now that the tool is not faulty but designed this way. I also do not understand how the US PACS does its matching, but for them each time it just flags as a technical error which needs to be addressed and controlled for each time before the image is read by a radiologist. They are a massive commercial company who do some reading for us (Medecins Sans Frontieres) for free, so I cant really ask them to change any of their systems, but rather to just work with them. The DOB is not important, I would rather leave it off all together. It just that CC creates on with the anonymsiing, and comes up as inconsistent to the original file.

I hope this is somewhat clear!