Stripping leading zeroes from Patient ID

[wtang]

Is there a way to remove the leading zeroes from the Patient ID field? We have a Hitachi Airis I MRI that insists on padding our patient ID's with leading zeroes. The problem is that our RIS and and all our other Dicom modalities don't use leading zeroes. When an existing patient returns to our office for an MRI, PacsOne sees the zero padded patient ID as a new patient.

Regards,
Warren Tang

[pacsone]

The current Dicom standard allows padding of Patient ID with leading spaces, but not the '0' character because it is a valid alpha-numeric character. So you should mention this Dicom non-conformance to the Hitachi tech support folks, because the patient id of "00012345" is technically different from the patient id of "12345".

[wtang]

The problem is the Hitachi Airis MRI is not Dicom. We added a NAI Dicom Box to make it Dicom. The NAI box simply reads the patient ID off the screen of the MRI (using OCR). Hitachi says they can't change the MRI software to strip the leading zeroes. Is there any way that PacsOne can strip the leading zeroes?

Regards,
Warren Tang

[pacsone]

It'll be risky for any Dicom application (NAI Dicom box or PacsOne) to remove leading zeros from the Patient ID field because they are valid characters that can appear as a real patient id, so if you always remove the leading zeros from the patient id, you have the danger of messing up some other patient ids that do begin with the zero characters.

[tonytong]

The problem is the Hitachi Airis MRI is not Dicom. We added a NAI Dicom Box to make it Dicom. The NAI box simply reads the patient ID off the screen of the MRI (using OCR). Hitachi says they can't change the MRI software to strip the leading zeroes. Is there any way that PacsOne can strip the leading zeroes?

Regards,
Warren Tang

did you resolve it? I have the same issue now...

[pacsone]

Is the leading zero pattern fixed for the Patient ID? e.g., always 3 leading 0's? If so, you can define the following Data Element Coercion rule from the "Tools->Data Element Coercion" menu for this particular Hitachi AE:

000*->*

So that the incoming Patient ID of "00012345" will be stored as "12345" in the PacsOne Server database. Please be aware that since the Patient ID is coerced/modified, PacsOne will return a Warning C-STORE-RSP status to the sending device/app (Hitachi?). You need to make sure the sending device/app will NOT interpret the Warning status as an Error condition, as some legacy Dicom device/application do not distinguish the Warning vs Error status from the C-STORE-RSP response, then therefore may abort transferring the rest of the images.