Hi all,
We have several use cases where a standalone DICOM viewer is needed for users to view images that are NOT ingested into our PACS/VNA Solutions. These range from scanned DENTAL models, random research studies that radiologists need to view and a few other niche scenarios.
We have been asked to provide some options for a basic, deployable and compliant application (DSPT, GDPR, DPIA) that can be licensed in the Trust for use.
Does anyone have any recommendations or experience of this?
This would be for approx. 15-20 users in total and installed on specific PCs in the Trust.
Both are open source DICOM viewers available for free so you can try them out and see if either fit with your requirements. Aeskulap is pretty basic and not well maintained but is lightweight. Weasis has more features.
You may find that these don’t fit with the certification (DSPT, GDPR, DPIA) requirement but I mention them as I’ve used them and they may be an acceptable compromise for research studies.
Weasis does have an MSI so could be deployed using enterprise tools.
May be more than you’re looking for, but if there’s a chance of needing to view RT objects then I would recommend taking a look at Conquest Dicom Server
I’ve had some success with K-PACS. There is a free version and a licensed version (although I haven’t looked into which boxes that version ticks on the compliance side).
I’ve used the free version to convert bitmaps to DICOM, view studies that were problematic on PACS and also to import studies from USB in circumstances where the modality couldn’t send to PACS or where PACS was rejecting the study.
The last time I saw the paid version being used was at UCLH back in 2015. It was being used by the research team to prepare anonymised packages for upload to a third party portal. That was a time-consuming job because the Agfa PACS was duplicating PID tags into private tags, so all those had to be removed and all the images with burned in PID pixels had to be converted to TIFF, edited and converted back to DICOM.
The free version of K-PACS bailed me out of a problem at another Agfa site. The PACS front end went down Trust wide but I was able to query the database directly, get the images and burn a CD for a patient who was already anaesthetised in theatre.
These sorts of viewers (that can burn CDs also) are useful for testing how your PACS imports studies. You can “manufacture” all manner of scenarios with duplicate MRN, accession number and so on. I used K-PACS a few years back to help Imperial with some import tests on PACS.
We use ClearCanvas for CD imports, ad-hoc study distribution and for DICOM connectivity trouble shooting. When you are sending or receiving studies, you can see detailed progress of the transfer.
It can handle pretty much any DICOM dialect.
It is a pretty good viewer although closing studies is a bit unintuitive.
We hope to use it shortly in a remote X-ray room as a stand alone viewer for the occasional moment when a local rabbit chews through the fibre cable.
They have a DICOM server as well, which I have used for Research support.