To develop and maintain the DICOM Structured Reporting specification, and to collaborate with DICOM working groups and other Standards development committees in the development of specialized reports and other documents based on the generic SR specification.

Short-Term Objectives

• Create a set of guidelines for template creators.
• Support the creation of general, reusable templates components and outlines.
• Maintain the SR infrastructure.
• Create cross-specialty SR templates.
• Develop a methodology (with a standardized graphical notation) to describe templates.
• Assist WG-20 in the integration of DICOM SR with other Standards efforts, in particular HL7, and support SR development in the various DICOM WGs.
• Provide technical support for demonstration of SR as required by IHE, MITA, etc.
• Develop a process for submitting clinical use cases and requirements for SR templates.
• Develop a means of specifying SR presentation.
• Develop a formal syntax for encoding the definition of templates and context groups in efforts to facilitate creation of a machine-readable version of these parts of the Standard.

Current Status

Working Group Eight meets quarterly. The meetings usually take place at the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA) in Oak Brook, Illinois.

Additional telephone conferences are scheduled as necessary.

Current Work Items

WG-08 is currently developing Supplement 155, which will formalize the standard for reporting templates, such as those being developed by the RSNA Reporting Subcommittee. These templates differ from current DICOM Structured Reporting (“DICOM SR”) in that they are intended to specify report content to be “filled in” by the reporting radiologist. Supplement 155 also will define the transformation of completed reporting templates into HL7 Clinical Document Architecture (CDA) documents.

Risks

Since the assignment of Clinical Codes to DICOM SR Documents is an essential part of the development process of SR related Supplements, the quality of the resulting Supplements as well as the development speed depends on a close co-operation with providers of Coding Schemes used by DICOM SR.

Challenges and Opportunities

• Establish co-operations with Coding Scheme providers
• Support WG-20 in the co-operation with HL7 in the field of the Clinical Document Architecture (CDA)

Relationship to Other Standards

• HL7
• IHE
• RSNA Reporting Committee
• SNOMED
• LOINC
• UCUM
• ISO-TC215
• CEN-TC251
• ACR