When you add an anatomic entity or imaging observation component to your template, you may add one or more characteristics to it. When you import a template into an imaging application, each template component becomes a heading and characteristics describe the component. For example, the component could be "Lesion" with the characteristics of "Enhancement Quality", "Proportion Enhancing", "Proportion nCET", and "Proportion Necrosis".

Anatomic entity characteristics and imaging observation characteristics can be quantifiable or non-quantifiable. A quantifiable value can be scale, quantile (such as quartile, percentile, or n-tile), numerical like a decimal number in a UCUM (Unified Code for Units of Measurement) unit, and interval. Examples of non-quantifiable characteristics are present, absent, and not applicable.

1. Add a template component of the Anatomic Entity or Imaging Observation.
2. Right-click the component and select Create Anatomic Entity Characteristic () or Create Imaging Observation Characteristic ().

3. Specify information describing the characteristic, as follows.

   Field	Description
   Label	Required field. Double-click this field to add a label. A label becomes a heading in the image annotation form that users complete once the template is imported into an imaging application. For example, "Lesion".
   Explanatory Text	Description of the component; for example, "Select the type of lesion".
   Answer Choices	Required field. The minimum and maximum number of times the users may select this term when they annotate an image. The number of answer choices you add must be greater than or equal to the maximum number you specify here.
   Should Display	Required field. Select this box to display this component in the template. In certain situations, information in a component is known and will not be changed. If you choose not to display a question (a characteristic) in a template, you must specify a default answer if the minimum number of answer choices is one or greater.
   Annotator Confidence	Required field. Display or hide this value. Annotator confidence is a percentage that represents the level of user confidence in answering the question.
   Require Comment	Select Yes or No to indicate whether users must provide a comment when answering this question.
   Authors	Describes the AIM Template Builder user who created this component.
   Group Label	Describes any text that you want to associate with one or more template components and thereby group them together for display purposes.

4. Click Save.
5. Add an answer choice to the characteristic.
6. Create a characteristic quantification.