An adhesive window is attached to the patient's skin centered over the lesion. Initially, the macroscopic camera is clipped into the adhesive window and a macroscopic image acquired. The macroscopic camera is then unclipped from the adhesive tissue window. The adhesive tissue window remains in place.
The confocal microscope is positioned, orientated, and clipped into the same adhesive tissue window, thus centering the two otherwise unrelated images which have different fields of view (FOV). The FOV of each image is encoded inField of View Dimension(s) (0018,1149).
Using the confocal microscope user interface, the user "draws" a region of interest over the macroscopic image where they wish to acquire a confocal microscopy mosaic image. The rectangle will be converted to stage co-ordinates which are used to direct the confocal microscope. The confocal microscopy can image up to an 8mm square area.
The macroscopic and the confocal image need to be correlated at both image level and spatial co-ordinate level.
The macroscopic image and the confocal microscopy image have a common frame of reference which is encoded by the Frame of Reference UID (0020,0052).
The Referenced Image Functional Group Macro should present to encode the spatial correlation between a macroscopic image (used as a localizer) and a confocal microscopy image.
At the image level, Referenced Image Sequence (0008,1140) is used to identify the SOP instance of the macroscopic image correlated to the confocal microscopy image. The macroscopic image will be acquired first. Hence, the Referenced Image Sequence (0008,1140) needs to be encoded in the confocal microscopy image. The Purpose of Reference Code Sequence (0040, A170) will have the value (121311, DCM, "Localizer").
Spatial information is encoded in the Plane Position (Slide) Functional Group Macro via the Image Position (Patient) (0020,0032) Attribute, which encodes the X, Y, and Z coordinates of the upper left-hand corner of staged area (Figure BBBBB.4-1). The Z coordinate encodes depth, which may be 0.
