TCE Service User's Manual

The RSNA MIRC implementation contains an IHE TCE Export Receiver which receives manifests, Additional Teaching File Information (ATFI) objects, and DICOM instances from an IHE Export Manager and creates MIRCdocuments. This article describes special features which extend the IHE TCE specification to provide capabilities not included in the current definition of TCE.

Key Object Description

The Key Object Description element in the IHE manifest is an Unlimited Text DICOM element. Some PACS vendors provide a user interface on the Export Selector (typically a PACS workstation) allowing the user to populate this element with comments. Since the TCE specification does not provide elements for certain fields of interest to teaching file authors, MIRC implements a syntax for the element and parses it whenever a manifest is received.

The syntax allows character sequences in the form mirc:path=value to be inserted anywhere in the element text, where path defines the path from the root element of the MIRCdocument to the element whose value is to be modified and value is the value to be inserted in the element. Paths do not include the root element name. Whitespace is not allowed in mirc:path=. Values may contain whitespace, including newline characters. Values consist of all the characters after the equal sign and before the next mirc:path=value sequence.

IHE currently does not define elements for two important fields:

• the username on the teaching file system;
• the title of the created document.

The Key Object Description syntax can be used to supply these fields as shown below:

mirc:title=My Document Title
mirc:authorization/owner=myusername
mirc:freetext=

For an element in a MIRCdocument to be populated from the parsed values in the Key Object Description element, there must be an element in the TCE template.xml file which has the same path. Any parsed value which does not correspond to a path in the MIRCdocument is ignored.

In the example above, the last item, mirc:freetext=, is used to delimit the previous item and to allow users to insert comments.

The entire contents of the Key Object Description element are inserted in the Notes section of the template, allowing the author to see any unparsable notes passed in the element.