PacsOne Server

In study.php,
what is the "modalities" used for?

I have a study that is consisted of few series of MR images.
But at the study.php, modalities shown is "N/A".

Why is it so?

Modalities is a Dicom data element that describes the modalities a study contains, e.g., MR, CT, US, etc. This data element is however not mandatory per Dicom standard, so many input modalities simply leave this data empty. If that's the case, you'll see N/A displayed from the PacsOne Server web page.

I experienced the same problem while evaluating the demo version. I am wondering why Modalities is empty on the study level, but the correct modalities are displayed on the series level after selecting the study? So the information seems to be in the DICOM images.

Best regards
Thorsten

There are 2 modality related information here:

1. Modalities In Study:

This is a Study-level attribute and it's parsed from the Modalities In Study (0008,0061) data element of the received Dicom images. However, some input modalities do not fill in this value when encoding the acquired images, so PacsOne Server will display the value as N/A if this information is not available.

2. Modality:

This is a Series-level attribute and it's parsed from the Modality (0008,0060) data element of the received Dicom images. If you click through the series list of a selected study, you will see this information displayed for each series of that study.

So what you are observing is that the Modality (0008,0060) information is available for each series of the received study, but the Modalities In Study (0008,0061) information was not filled in by the input modalities so the value of N/A is displayed,

For the next release of PacsOne Server, we will change the current implementation so that PacsOne Server will accumulatively collect the Modality information from all series of the study and display the accumulated value if the Modalities In Study (0008,0061) information is not available. For example, if the the Modalities In Study (0008,0061) information is not available for a study and the study has 1 CT series and 1 US series, then PacsOne Server will display "CT, US" as the Modalities information for that study.