G Explanation of Grouping Criteria For Multi-frame Functional Group IODs (Informative)
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# G Explanation of Grouping Criteria For Multi-frame Functional Group IODs (Informative)

This Annex was formerly located in Annex N in PS3.3 in the 2003 and earlier revisions of the standard.

When considering how to group an attribute, one needs to consider first of all whether or not the values of an attribute are different per frame. The reasons to consider whether to allow an attribute to change include:

- The more attributes that change, the more parsing a receiving application has to do in order to determine if the multi-frame object has frames the application should deal with. The more choices, the more complex the application becomes, potentially resulting in interoperability problems.

- The frequency of change of an attribute must also be considered. If an attribute could be changed every frame then obviously it is not a very good candidate for making it fixed, since this would result in a multi-frame size of 1.

- The number of applications that depend on frame level attribute grouping is another consideration. For example, one might imagine a pulse sequence being changed in a real-time acquisition, but the vast majority of acquisitions would leave this constant. Therefore, it was judged not too large a burden to force an acquisition device to start a new object when this happens. Obviously, this is a somewhat subjective decision, and one should take a close look at the attributes that are required to be fixed in this document.

- The attributes from the image pixel module must not change in a multi-frame object due to legacy tool kits and implementations.

- The potential frequency of change is dependent on the applications both now and likely during the life of this standard. The penalty for failure to allow an attribute to change is rather high since it will be hard/impossible to change later. Making an attribute variable that is static is more complex and could result in more header space usage depending on how it is grouped. Thus there is a trade-off of complexity and potentially header size with not being able to take advantage of the multi-frame organization for an application that requires changes per frame.

Once it is decided which attributes should be changed within a multi-frame object then one needs to consider the criteria for grouping attributes together:

- Groupings should be designed so those attributes that are likely to vary together should be in the same sequence. The goal is to avoid the case where attributes that are mostly static have to be included in a sequence that is repeated for every frame.

- Care should be taken so that we define a manageable number of grouping sequences. Too few sequences could result in many static attributes being repeated for each frame, when some other element in their sequence was varying, and too many sequences becomes unwieldy.

- The groupings should be designed such that modality independent attributes are kept separate from those that are MR specific. This will presumably allow future working groups to reuse the more general groupings. It also should allow software that operates on multi-frame objects from multiple objects maximize code reuse.

- Grouping related attributes together could convey some semantics of the overall contents of the multi-frame object to receiving applications. For instance, if a volumetric application finds the Plane Orientation Macro present in the Per-frame Functional Groups Sequence, it may decide to reject the object as inappropriate for volumetric calculations.

Specific notes on attribute grouping:

- Attributes not allowed to change: Image Pixel Module (due to legacy toolkit concerns); and Pulse Sequence Module attributes (normally do not change except in real-time - it is expected real time applications can handle the complexity and speed of starting new IODs when pulse sequence changes).

- Sequences not starting with the word "MR" could be applied to more modalities than just MR.

- All attributes that must be in a frame header were placed in the Frame Content Macro.

- Position and orientation are in separate sequences since they are changed independently.

- For real-time sequences there are contrast mechanisms that can be applied to base pulse sequences and are turned on and off by the operator depending on the anatomy being imaged and the time/contrast trade-off associated with these. Such modifiers include: IR, flow compensation, spoiled, MT, and T2 preparation… These probably are not changed in non-real-time scans. These are all kept in the MR Modifier Macro.

"Number of Averages" attributes is in its own sequence because real-time applications may start a new averaging process every time a slice position/orientation changes. Each subsequent frame will average with the preceding N frames where N is chosen based on motion and time. Each frame collected at a particular position/orientation will have a different number of averages, but all other attributes are likely to remain the same. This particular application drives this attribute being in its own group.

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