Prioritise Content over Series over Study date

[Ed McDonagh]

Radiotherapy DICOM objects have a study date that relates to the start of the treatment; therefore weeks worth of imaging can all have the same study date.

This discussion on the google group proposes that instead the Content date is prioritised.

I think this is sensible, and I don’t immediately think that it would cause an issue for radiology exams - except potentially for non-RDSR derived entries for DX or MG, if they straddle a midnight? Some Nuclear Medicine studies take place over multiple days, I don’t know if they have any imaging that might be affected by this?

Study/Series/Content time all gets recorded where it exists. Currently if StudyTime doesn’t exist, ContentTime is use, else SeriesTime.

However, the Summary pages will use the StudyDate (now proposed to be ContentDate) and StudyTime to order the studies in the list. I presume this would cause a problem with RT imaging as well, as all the subsequent imaging would be listed with the correct date, but with the time of the original instance.

If we change this to ContentTime of the RDSR, then everything will appear to be later than they did before in summary tables, exports etc. ContentTime of the RDSR will often be the last event that happened, whereas currently we are recording/displaying/exporting the time of the first event - starting the exam.

An initial quick look would suggest the time isn’t going to be a specific problem for image derived DX/MG studies.

I think we need to think about this before implementing it!