All termsSystems
Modality
An imaging device that acquires studies — CT, MRI, X-ray, ultrasound, mammography, and so on.
When to use it
Add a modality for each acquisition device that produces images and needs a worklist and a destination to send to.
In plain terms
The camera of the imaging world: it captures the study, then hands it off to be stored and read.
Common gotchas
- Modalities pull their worklist via DICOM MWL (C-FIND) — a broken worklist means manual entry and mismatched IDs.
- They push images via C-STORE and report progress via MPPS; these are separate connections.
- Older modalities may support only a limited DICOM feature set or character encoding.