Supplement 23 to DICOM (Digital Imaging and Communications for Medicine), Structured Reporting, is a specification that supports a semantically rich representation of image and waveform content, enabling experts to share image and related patient information. DICOM SR supports the representation of textual and coded data linked to images and waveforms. Nevertheless, the medical information technology community needs models that work as bridges between the DICOM relational model and open object-oriented technologies. The authors assert that representations of the DICOM Structured Reporting standard, using object-oriented modeling languages such as the Unified Modeling Language, can provide a high-level reference view of the semantically rich framework of DICOM and its complex structures. They have produced an object-oriented model to represent the DICOM SR standard and have derived XML-exchangeable representations of this model using World Wide Web Consortium specifications. They expect the model to benefit developers and system architects who are interested in developing applications that are compliant with the DICOM SR specification.

With the framework described it is feasible to generate XML Schema using the existing DICOM SR specification. It can also be applied to generate XML Schemas for other DICOM information objects.

In this paper, the authors describe a methodology to transform programmatically structured reporting (SR) templates defined by the Digital Imaging and Communications for Medicine (DICOM) standard into an XML schema representation. Such schemas can be used in the creation and validation of XML-encoded SR documents that use templates. Templates are a means to put additional constraints on an SR document to promote common formats for specific reporting applications or domains. As the use of templates becomes more widespread in the production of SR documents, it is important to ensure validity of such documents. The work described in this paper is an extension of the authors' previous work on XML schema representation for DICOM SR. Therefore, this paper inherits and partially modifies the structure defined in the earlier work.