Query by Example Considerations for Custom Worklists

Introduction

Consider the following guidelines when using Query by Example (QBE) within custom Worklists. See Creating a QBE Worklist .

Searching Within a Large Number of Studies

Search Consideration	Recommendation
Searching for studies or patients from All Studies Worklists, when the system has millions of studies and patients.	Use the most selective QBE filters possible. See Using Advanced QBE .
The most optimal QBE searches from All Studies Worklists occur when you enter the entire study/patient identifier.	Fields that identify the exact study are designed to respond the fastest. Accession number Patient MRN Patient names Study instance ID Note: For the fastest search response in All Studies Worklists, it is strongly recommended to disable the Adaptive Search feature. See your System Administrator for more information.

Search Consideration

Recommendation

Searching for studies or patients from All Studies Worklists, when the system has millions of studies and patients.

Use the most selective QBE filters possible. See Using Advanced QBE .

The most optimal QBE searches from All Studies Worklists occur when you enter the entire study/patient identifier.

Fields that identify the exact study are designed to respond the fastest.

Accession number
Patient MRN
Patient names
Study instance ID
Note: For the fastest search response in All Studies Worklists, it is strongly recommended to disable the Adaptive Search feature. See your System Administrator for more information.

Search Options when Study or Patient Details are Unknown

In the event the specific study or patient details are unknown, start searches using study date ranges, and then filter further. Without specific study details, searches can become data mining operations conducted on the entire PACS database, introducing the possibility of poor performance.

The following is an example of an optimal data mining search:

Use a study date range of 12/15/2020 to 12/22/2020, and then add a patient name starting with Bo. Because there could be 10+ million studies spanning years of data, there may be tens of thousands patients with names starting with Bo.
As more details of the patient are known, add the full last name for a better system response.

Advanced QBE Searches

The following advanced QBE searches (shown below), when used by themselves without other filters, are considered wildcard searches, for which the database cannot use any underlying index. This type of search might be slow to return results.

When you use the advanced QBE filters on an All Studies Worklist without any other filter conditions, the entire database needs to be scanned to return results. Depending on the size of the database, this response could take between 3 and 30 seconds.

Filter	Description
!	Does not start with
/	Contains
\	Does not contain
-x& -y&-z	Not in the list of (x,y,z)

Note:

It is strongly recommended to disable the Adaptive Search feature when using wildcard searches. See your System Administrator for more information.

Effective Wildcard Search Examples

The following are some wildcard search examples that work very well when used in combination with other QBEs: