Secondary Capture SOP Class

Secondary Capture SOP Class is used for several applications such as:

· Digitized film

· Screen capture for non-digital modalities

· Screen capture to save text, annotations or other miscellaneous information with a study

· Back-up for modalities that support rare native SOP classes

· Reconstructions from CT/MR

· Scanned Documents

The secondary capture image object is very simple; there are very few required attributes, which is both an advantage and a disadvantage. The advantage is that there is relatively little information to be entered in order to create this object. The disadvantage is that there are many options and few restrictions, which can be a challenge from an interoperability perspective. These objects are typically identified as modality type “OT” (“Other”).
A new set of secondary capture objects have been defined to tighten some of the requirements in the header and provide more efficient pixel storage through a single bit option, while adding a color Secondary Capture SOP Class.

When using the secondary capture for frame grabbing video, such as from an Ultrasound, several vendors have implemented Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to automatically detect the patient name and other identification potentially eliminating the data entry step.