Best Practices: Naming Acquisitions for Automated Classification

Instruction Steps

One of the first gears that is run when new DICOM data are loaded in to Flywheel is the Scitran: DICOM MR Classifier gear. This gear extracts header information from the DICOMs to determine how to classify the image data. Proper classification has many benefits in how these data can be used in downstream workflows and processes.

While it may seem like magic when it works, the classifier gear is only as good as the data it receives as input. One of the best ways to ensure proper classification is to name the acquisitions on the scanner in a descriptive manner. The SeriesDescription DICOM header field is where the acquisition name is stored in the DICOM file.

The table below shows some of the key strings that the classifier will look for in the SeriesDescription DICOM field to then associate those data with the appropriate classification scheme.

If one of those strings are not found within the SeriesDescription DICOM header field, the classifier will do its best with the context given, but with no guarantees of success. In those cases you should consider manual classification of your data. See Data-Classification for more information.