DICOM image viewers-CSDN博客

DICOM image viewers

Last update : May 30, 2016

Referring to my recent post about the DICOM standard, this contribution presents an overview about an important entity in the medical imaging workflow : DICOM image viewers. The list is not exhaustive; I did the following segmentation to present my personal selection of current DICOM image viewers :

Reference viewer
Reference toolkits
Open source viewers
Free proprietary viewers
Licensed commercial viewers
Mobile viewer apps
Other viewers

1. Reference DICOM Viewer

Today one project is generally considered as a reference for DICOM applications : OsiriX.

OsiriX

The OsiriX project started in November 2003. The first version was developed by Antoine Rosset, a radiologist from Geneva, Switzerland, working now at the La Tour Hospital in Geneva. He received a grant from the Swiss National Fund to spend one year in UCLA, Los Angeles, with Prof. Osman Ratib, to explore and learn about medical digital imaging. In October 2004, Antoine Rosset went back to the Geneva University Hospital in Switzerland, to continue his career as a radiologist, where he published an OsiriX reference article in June 2004 in the Journal of Digital Imaging. Joris Heuberger, a mathematician from Geneva, joined the project in March 2005 on a voluntary fellowship of 6 months in UCLA, Los Angeles. In June 2005, OsiriX received two prestigious Apple Design Awards : Best Use of Open Source and Best Mac OS X Scientific Computing Solution. Osman Ratib, Professor of Radiology in UCLA, returned to Geneva at the end of 2005 as the chairman of the Nuclear Medicine service.

In March 2009, Antoine Rosset, Joris Heuberger and Osman Ratib created the OsiriX Foundation to promote open-source in medicine. In February 2010, Antoine Rosset and Joris Heuberger created the company Pixmeo to promote and distribute the OsiriX MD version, certified for medical imaging. This version complies with the European Directive 93/42/EEC concerning medical devices. The price for a single licence is 678 EUR. The free lite version can be downloaded from the OsiriX website, the source code is available at Github.

OsiriX runs on Mac OSX and is released under the version 3 of the GNU Lesser General Public License. The current version is 7.0 and was released on December 7, 2015. Osirix can also be configured as a PACS server. The power of OsiriX can be extended with plugins.

OsririX Lite

An Osirix HD version for the iPad is available at the AppStore for 49,99 EUR.

2. Reference DICOM toolkits

DICOM toolkits are more than simple viewers; they are a complete set of tools, code samples, examples, documentation, tutorials etc to develop great healthcare applications.

DCMTK

DCMTK is a collection of libraries and applications implementing large parts the DICOM standard. It includes software for examining, constructing and converting DICOM image files, handling offline media, sending and receiving images over a network connection, as well as demonstrative image storage and worklist servers. DCMTK is is written in a mixture of ANSI C and C++. It comes in complete source code and is made available as open source software.

DCMTK is an ancestor of DICOM applications. In 1993, before the official release of the standard, a DICOM prototype implementation was created by OFFIS, the University of Oldenburg and the CERIUM (Centre Européen d’Imagerie à Usage Médical) research centre in Rennes (France) on behalf of the European Committee for Standardization (CEN/TC251/WG4).

The current version of DCMTK is 3.6.1, released in June 2015. The related snapshot is available at the dicom.offis.de website. DICOMscope is the related free DICOM viewer which can display uncompressed, monochrome DICOM images from all modalities and which supports monitor calibration according to DICO