Text Overlays Overview

Introduction

You can manage the display of text overlay information for a study by doing the following:

Use the context menu options or the related keyboard shortcut to manually change text overlays.
Use Overlay user settings to show or hide text overlays automatically when you open a study.

Default Text Overlays

Each modality has a default text overlay that can be customized. The default text overlay information includes Patient Name, Page Number, and Image Identification displayed on the top and bottom of an image or series. Properties such as page number, image number, and series number always display.

The age that displays is the age of the patient at the time of the study, and is in the following format:

If less than 3 months, age displays in days
If between 3 months and 3 years, age displays in months
If between 3 years and 18 years, age displays in years and months using the form aY bM (where a is years, b is months)
If older than 18 years, age displays in years

Note:

Patient age in the image overlay is calculated as the difference between the patient's date of birth and the date/time of the image acquisition. As a result, the patient age that displays in the image overlay information may differ from the patient age that displays in contexts where age is calculated on the entire study.

Synapse always displays the highest quality image available. If you display the original image, Synapse does not display the compression ratio in the text overlay. Otherwise, Synapse displays the compression ratios provided by the modality.

Examples of Text Overlay Information

Patient Name
Page Number
Procedure Description
Series Description
Study Date / Time
Medical Record Number (MRN)

For Mammography studies, the page number and study date / time are displayed in a larger font size.

Text overlays for 2D images related to Breast Tomosynthesis studies have the following information appended to the laterality/view code displayed in the overlay, to identify whether the image is synthetic and the corresponding Tomosynthesis series:

[S](Tn) for synthetic images
(Tn) for non-synthetic images

For example: RCC [S](T1)

This appended information also displays in the enhanced labeling for the image thumbnails. See Labeling for Mammography Thumbnails.

Text overlays for 3D view can also vary. Some examples of text overlays for 3D view are as follows:

Window Level
Slice Number
Study Date / Time
Scale Marker

Mammography

For Mammography (MG) series, text overlay information displays on the anterior side of the anatomy opposite the chest wall, to avoid potential superimposition of text over the image.

Note:

This is dependent on View Code Sequence and Image Laterality DICOM information.

Options for Configuring Text Overlays

You can configure text overlays in the following ways: