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DICOM PS3.3 2020a - Information Object Definitions |
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Attribute Name |
Tag |
Type |
Attribute Description |
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Categorizesthelocalityoftheentityfromwhencetheinstanceoriginated.
Enumerated Values:
LOCAL Acquired or created in the local entity.
IMPORTEDImported from an external entity.
Note
1.The interpretation of the meaning of local and imported are user-specific. The purpose of this Attribute is to provide a means of communicating a user-specific decision, not to attempt to achieve uniformity with respect to any particular organizational or geographical boundary around any particular organizational or geographical entity, be it an entity that is a device, system, facility, office, department, site, enterprise, region, nation, etc.
2.A typical pattern would be for an archive to set a value of LOCAL when receiving instances on the network from a modalitywithinthehospitalbuttosetavalueofIMPORTED whenreceivinginstancesfromaninterchangemediareader oranexternalnetworkinstancesharinggateway.Displaying thevalueofthisAttributeinaviewerthenmakesitapparent to a user whether or not an instance is "one of their own". How a receiver determines whether or not the sender is localisnotspecified,butcould,forexample,bedetermined from the sender's AE Title.
3.When instances are transported from one entity to another and then imported, it is expected that this Attribute be set to an appropriate value for the new context, overwriting any previous value. E.g., a value of LOCAL used within an archiveatthesitewheretheinstanceswereacquiredwould be coerced to a value of IMPORTED when those instances werereceivedbyanothersitetowhichthepatienthadbeen transferred. Whether or not previous values of this Attribute are copied into Original Attributes Sequence (0400,0561) after coercion is not specified.
4.It is not expected (but nor is it prohibited) that this Attribute willberemovedbyanexportingentity,sinceitmaybeuseful to a recipient to know whether or not the instance was local to the previous entity or not. Similarly, a modality may populate this Attribute with a value of LOCAL after creating the images, but is not required to.
5.Theround-tripcase,e.g.,whenanimageisacquiredlocally, exported, locally deleted and then re-imported may be challenging unless a local record is maintained. I.e., after acquisition, in the local archive it would be expected to be LOCAL. After re-importation without any local state, it may be hard to determine that it once was LOCAL. Other Attributes such as Institution Name may not be sufficient to reliably detect this.
6.A new SOP Instance UID (0008,0018) is not required when adding or coercing this Attribute, since a derived instance is not being created. See Section C.12.4.1.1 Derivation