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Exploring Ultrasound Multi-frame Image Storage Structured Report support for Slicer/OHIF

Key Investigators

• Deepa Krishnaswamy (Brigham and Women's Hospital, USA)
• Andrey Fedorov (Brigham and Women's Hospital, USA)
• Chris P. Bridge (Massachusetts General Hospital, USA)
• Dave Dinh (Brigham and Women's Hospital, USA)
• Tina Kapur (Brigham and Women's Hospital, USA)

Project Description

Our team has built a 3D Slicer extension for ultrasound anonymization, annotation, and adjudication (https://github.com/SlicerUltrasound/SlicerUltrasound). We are currently trying to port the functionality of these tools to OHIF in order to make the processing more streamlined for clinicians and avoid the downloading of additional tools.

However, we currently store all of our annotations as JSON. This can be problematic as JSON can be prone to misinterpretation; we had to write specialized software to load these annotations into Slicer, and we are missing much of the metadata to associate the file with the referenced image.

In this project, I want to see if using DICOM Structured Reports (SR) will help our use case. Having our files as SRs would help us to utilize the cloud and retain all important metadata. But it might also make processing more complicated. Therefore, the goal of this week is to see how much effort is needed to add functionality to Slicer/OHIF for Ultrasound Multi-frame Image Storage.

Objective

1. Create support for Ultrasound Multi-frame Image Storage in Slicer and OHIF

Approach and Plan

1. Create a DICOM Structured Report for our annotations using Ultrasound Multi-frame Image Storage (both pleura line and B-line points/lines, and manual annotations like pleural percentage)
2. Add functionality to 3D Slicer core for loading, parsing, and viewing these SRs.
3. Make sure that the SR can be loaded into the official OHIF viewer.
4. Add functionality to the OHIF usAnnotation extension to save the annotations as an SR
5. Deploy OHIF with usAnnotation to connect to the cloud (Google Healthcare DICOM datastore)

Progress and Next Steps

1. Converted our JSON annotation file to a DICOM SR
2. Confirmed the DICOM SR can load in OHIF
3. Started implementing changes to Slicer core to view this type of annotation SR

Illustrations

Current workflow:

Successfully loaded the converted annotations in OHIF!

Background and References

No response