DICOM Structured reports are DICOM SOP Instances, organised just the same way as images etc., but which hold reports rather than images. They are typically therefore only a few kilobytes in size. They contain all the same indexing information as images, and therefore fit into the standard 4 level DICOM Hierarchy, complete with their own “psuedo-modality” of SR.

They live with the same study (and therefore have the same Study UID) as the images to which they relate, but as the DICOM rules only allow one modality per series, they (like Presentation States) sit in their own series.

The “Structure” of Structure Report

The following graph shows the basic structure of SR files:

Use in DicomObjects

DicomObjects has full facilities for producing SR objects, including all the necessary nested Sequences, and can of course handle and store them just like other DICOM objects. Likewise, developers have full programmatic access to the data in the SR object, but DicomObjects does not however contain a native “renderer” to display SR objects.

Developers can download our SR to HTML sample converter to take a look at how you extract values from the SR object and hopefully it helps decide how you wish to display SR content.