AA.3.3 Dose Reporting Post-processing
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### AA.3.3 Dose Reporting Post-processing

A specialized Radiation Safety workstation the may contribute to the process of dose reporting in terms of more elaborate calculations or graphical dose data displays, or by aggregating dose data over multiple studies. See Figure AA.3-3. The Radiation Safety workstation may or may not be integrated with the Long-Term Storage function in a single system; such application entity architectural decisions are outside the scope of DICOM, but DICOM services and information objects do facilitate a variety of possible architectures.

Figure AA.3-3. Dose Reporting Post-Processing

The Radiation Safety workstation may be able to create specific reports to respond to dose registry requirements, as established by local regulatory authorities. These reports would generally not be in DICOM format, but would be generated from the data in DICOM X-Ray Radiation Dose SR objects.

The Radiation Safety workstation may also be used to generate more elaborate reports on patient applied dose. The workstation may retrieve the Dose Reports for multiple procedures performed on a particular patient. A report of the cumulative dose for a specified time period, or for a visit/admission, may be generated, encoded as a DICOM Dose Report, and stored in the Long-Term Storage system. Any such further reports will be stored in addition to the "basic report".

Note that such cumulative Dose Reports may describe irradiation events that are also documented in other Dose Reports. The assignment of a UID to each irradiation event allows the application to identify unique irradiation events that may be reported in multiple objects. The structure of the X-Ray Radiation Dose SR object also allows a cumulative report to reference the contributing report objects using the Predecessor Documents Sequence (0040,A360) attribute.

An advanced application may be able to use the Dose Report data, potentially supplemented by the data in the image objects referenced in the Dose Report, to create a Dose Map that visualizes applied dose. Such a Dose Map may be sent to the Long-Term Storage system using an appropriate object format.

Other purposes of the Radiation Safety workstation may include statistical analyses over all Dose Report Objects in order to gain information for educational or quality control purposes. This may include searches for Reports performed in certain time ranges, or with specific equipment, or using certain protocols.

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