Using the CTP EmailService Pipeline Stage

This article describes how to configure the CTP EmailService pipeline stage to send emails when studies are processed. The intended audience for this article is CTP administrators configuring pipelines for clinical trials.

The EmailService is a processor stage. For each object it receives, it stores the identifier of the study (StudyInstanceUID) and the time the object was encountered. If no object is encountered for a study after 10 minutes, it then sends an email to the recipients identified in the stage's configuration element.

The EmailService is only capable of sending to SMTP email servers.

The recommended way to configure the EmailService into a pipeline is to use the Configuration editor in the Launcher program. See The CTP Launcher Configuration Editor for details of editing configurations.

Like all pipeline stages, the EmailService stage is configured with a single XML element in the config.xml file. The details of the element are described in the main CTP article Although the Configuration Editor obviates the need to edit or even read the XML, the default XML element is shown below for clarity:

<EmailService
    name="EmailService"
    class="org.rsna.ctp.stdstages.EmailService"
    root="roots/EmailService"
    script="scripts/EmailService.script"
    smtpServer=""
    username=""
    password=""
    from=""
    to=""
    cc=""
    subject=""
    includeModality="no"
    includePatientID="no"
    includePatientName="no"
    includeStudyDate="no"
    logSentEmails="no"
    quarantine="quarantines/EmailService"/>

The include... attributes specify the content that is included in the emails. The placement of the pipeline stage in the pipeline determines whether that information will be PHI. To be specific, if the object received has not been de-identified, either before receipt by the pipeline or by a preceding anonymizer in the pipeline itself, then the values included in the emails will be PHI. This may be appropriate in some circumstances, but care must be taken because the email transmission is not secure.