Submit Public Comments on DICOM Supplement 238: Assertion Collection

DICOM invites stakeholders to submit comments on Supplement 238: Assertion Collection

Foreword
With an increasing number of DICOM Instances from different modalities for a single patient visit and related assertions for them, such as approval, the need to collect these assertions outside the actual Instances arises. The Assertion Collection IOD proposed in this Supplement addresses these issues, along with providing contextual information for the assertion and identification information for the referenced Instances.

Scope and Field of Application
The Assertion Collection IOD provides means to convey a collection of assertions for referenced instances along with the information during which clinical step the assertions were created, and other meta information.
- High-level identification information for the collection
This may be information from one or more of the referenced Instances so that the Assertion Collection can be easily identified without evaluating referenced Instances
- State definitions for the referenced Instances on Study, Series, Instance or Instance Component level
States allow to define assertions when e.g. Instances were added or removed, or when they were reviewed and/or approved, along detailed information for which purpose an assertion was made so that the context of an assertion is clear.
- State definitions for the Assertion Collection Instance itself.
This allows for assertion of the entire Assertion Collection. This may be applicable for e.g. treatment plans that are created in several planning steps, each step providing a set of assertions. A final review of the entire treatment plan by the physician may not include the verification of each asserted Instance, but a high-level assertion (“sign-off”) of the entire collection.
- Means to transfer content that was created during the collection of the assertions.
This may be information collected e.g. during treatment session and provides additional semantics for the collected references.

The design of the Assertion Collection is agnostic to any clinical domain and any requires domain-specific information that is modeled by codes, by including specific CIDs or TIDs.
Potential use cases of the Assertion Collection IOD include collection of assertions for instance references during post-acquisition/pre-planning, treatment planning, treatment delivery, pre- or post-treatment quality evaluation, and more.

An Assertion Collection Instance may be used as input for sub-sequent workflow steps, whereas the Assertion Collection IOD only represents a current state and does not include any forward-looking statements about further usage. It is not intended to control any workflow steps, just to represent the outcome.

All comments should be submitted as soon as possible but NO LATER than 11:59pm US EDT on Thursday, November 1, 2023.

Who can comment? All interested persons are invited to comment. Recipients of this solicitation should feel free to forward it to anyone who may be interested in this topic. There is no cost or obligation associated with commenting and DICOM membership is not required to comment. Commenters are requested to include their contact information.
What will happen to your comments? DICOM Working Group 6 (Base Standard) and DICOM Working Group 7 (Radiotherapy) will review the comments and discuss their resolution. WG-06 is authorized by the DICOM Standard Committee to decide on the technical merits of the comments.

Instructions for accessing the documents and submitting comments:
1. Download documents from the website (www.dicomstandard.org/comment)
-- or --
FTP server (ftp://medical.nema.org/MEDICAL/Dicom/Supps/PC/) under the file names:
- PDF DOCUMENT – sup238_pc_AssertionCollection.pdf
- WORD DOCUMENT – sup238_pc_AssertionCollection.docx
- PPT OVERVIEW – sup238_pc_AssertionCollection.pptx
(To facilitate the readers’ understanding of this new proposed addition to the DICOM Standard, the authors prepared a PowerPoint presentation which describes the technical issues and use cases.)

2. Submit comment(s): Send your comments to Shayna Knazik (This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.) via Word Document or free text within your email. Be sure to include the following information:
- Commenter’s name, affiliation, e-mail address.
- Comment – may be a higher-level statement or a detailed technical comment with tables, illustrations, cut-and-paste from the draft, etc.
- Proposed solution – may be a higher-level statement or a marked-up version or new text, tables, illustrations, etc.
- Line numbers associated with your comment(s).