3D-printing the "Orthanc" mask extension

June 8th, 2020

This is very unusual community contribution that might prove useful in these COVID-19 times!

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The STL model for 3D-printing an extension for face masks with the "Orthanc" logo is now available for download. This artwork is released by Philippe Jodogne under the CC BY-SA license. It should be compatible with most 3D printers. If you print this model, please publicly share photos of your realizations on your social networks!

Creating plugins in Python

April 1st, 2020

As part of our efforts to support the fight against the coronavirus pandemic, we today announce the release of the first version of the Python plugin for Orthanc! This plugin can be of great help to anyone wishing to automate her imaging workflow, to design/train new machine learning algorithms, or to deploy AI systems directly in clinical setups. Given the huge need for medical imaging in order to cope with COVID-19, we hope this contribution will prove to be helpful.

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Thanks to this new plugin, you can very easily extend Orthanc by creating scripts using the intuitive and expressive Python programming language. You just have to install the dedicated plugin, to set the PythonScript configuration option, and you're ready to extend Orthanc in a few lines of code. Your Python script has full access to third-party Python modules, as well as to the major features of the Orthanc plugin SDK. The Orthanc Book provides samples about some of the many possibilities offered by the Python plugin. Python scripts can easily extend the baseline REST API of Orthanc, listen to changes occurring in the Orthanc database, call pydicom onto clinical DICOM images, or apply imaging processing algorithms using the Python Imaging Library. The full ecosystem of Python modules is at hand: It is easy to create bridges with HL7, NIfTI/BIDS, or machine learning tools (such as PyTorch or TensorFlow). This development was announced during OrthancCon 2019 on last December, and was supported by Osimis, the commercial partner of Orthanc. Enjoy,

Sébastien-

MySQL and MariaDB support

July 17th, 2018

Today, we are excited to announce that the Orthanc project officially supports the highly popular MySQL and MariaDB databases through dedicated, free and open-source plugins! This new development expands the functional scope of Orthanc even more, as a large number of PACS administrators in hospitals are more familiar with these database engines than with PostgreSQL. This is a nice milestone, just 2 days before Orthanc celebrates its 6th birthday!

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This development was triggered last year by Osimis, the commercial partner of Orthanc, that launched a crowdfunding campaign to this end. Because the goal of the campaign was not met at that time, an industrial user of Orthanc has fortunately decided to help Osimis by funding this development. We wish to warmly thank this great partner for its support! Besides the "index" plugin that was the topic of the crowdfunding, a "blob storage area" plugin for MySQL and MariaDB has also been developed in order to store the DICOM files directly into an enterprise-ready database (a similar possibility already exists for PostgreSQL). Simultaneously, the PostgreSQL plugins have been rewritten almost from scratch in order to share as much C++ and SQL code as possible between all the database engines. Furthermore, the PostgreSQL plugins were optimized alongside, leading to their 2.2 release that was also released today. Thanks to this intricate refactoring, introducing support for new database engines will become a much more easier process (don't hesitate to get in touch with Osimis if you want to fund such a development ;-) ). As always, all this code is shared as free and open-source software to the benefit of the worldwide community of medical imaging: Check out our download page! Note that the Windows installers now come bundled with all the MySQL and PostgreSQL plugins. Enjoy,

Sébastien-

Orthanc Turns 5, New Release Available

July 19th, 2017

Exactly five years ago, on July 19th, 2012, Orthanc was publicly released for the first time. To celebrate this birthday, version 1.3.0 is now available for download! This new release contains many bugfixes and improvements.

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As of today, the entire Orthanc ecosystem consists of more than 140,000 lines of code, all released under a Free Software license (GPL/AGPL). Over the last year, two new components were added to this ecosystem: A plugin to bring support of DICOM for whole-slide microscopic imaging (digital pathology), and an innovative rendering engine for medical images that is called Stone of Orthanc. Stone of Orthanc was notably demonstrated to be the first toolkit able to render a PET-CT fusion in a Web browser using the emerging WebAssembly technology. Over the last year, given the huge number of inquiries originating from third-party hospitals, the University Hospital of Liège (from which the Orthanc project originates) has given its spin-off company Osimis the responsibility to develop a commercial activity on the top of Orthanc in order to sustain its development. Osimis develops a whole range of support services for hospitals, integrators, and/or end-users, according to an open-source business model. The Orthanc/Osimis joint effort reached its climax today, as shown in this photo of myself (Sébastien) together with the core developers of Osimis working together to create the 1.3.0 release: Over the following months, besides maintenance tasks, the Orthanc project will essentially focus on stabilizing the Stone of Orthanc. Our vision is indeed that Stone is a very important contribution to the medical imaging community, as it will make possible to create a whole new generation of DICOM viewers that are truly cross-platform: Indeed, thanks to the Stone of Orthanc, Web sites, mobile apps, and heavyweight clients that render medical images could all share the same C++ codebase. In parallel to the Stone of Orthanc, we wish to work on a MySQL database plugin, on the optimization of the database schemas if storing many studies, and on a new generation of the built-in Orthanc Explorer administrative Web interface. In a nutshell, the history of Orthanc is only at its very beginning... now, let's see what can be accomplished with five more years! :) Thanks to all the Orthanc community to make this success possible,

Sébastien-

Whole-Slide Imaging

October 22nd, 2016

The Orthanc project is delighted to announce that it now provides a reference, lightweight implementation of DICOM for whole-slide microscopic imaging (digital pathology).

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Our implementation is made of three components: A command-line tool to convert digital pathology images into DICOM, an Orthanc plugin to display such images, and a command-line tool to export DICOM whole-slide images as standard hierarchical TIFF images. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first free and open-source implementation of DICOM for whole-slide imaging. Check out the dedicated section about digital pathology on our homepage for more information! Enjoy,

Sébastien-

Stone of Orthanc

October 14th, 2016

A new companion tool to Orthanc has just been released! This free and open-source tool is called the Stone of Orthanc. Just like a palantír, Stone is a means of seeing medical images in Orthanc servers.

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More precisely, Stone of Orthanc is a lightweight, cross-platform C++ toolkit for the CPU-based rendering of medical images. It notably features support for MPR (multiplanar reconstruction of volume images), PET-CT fusion, and accurate physical world coordinates. Stone of Orthanc is similar in spirit to two other well-known toolkits: Cornerstone by Chris Hafey, a client-side JavaScript toolkit to display medical images in Web browsers. However, contrarily to Cornerstone, Stone of Orthanc is written in C++, and can be embedded into native, heavyweight applications.

VTK by Kitware, a C++ toolkit for scientific visualization. However, contrarily to VTK that relies on graphics processing units (GPU), Stone of Orthanc is entirely focused on software-based rendering. Within Stone, 3D volumes are handled as sets of 2D slices. Check out the dedicated section about Stone on our homepage for more information! We hope this new tool will contribute to the development of new, innovative, free and open-source applications for the viewing and analysis of medical images. Enjoy,

Sébastien-

First Stable Release of Orthanc

December 16th, 2015

After four years of intensive development, we are very happy to announce the release of the first stable version of Orthanc (version 1.0.0).

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By "stable", we mean that the feature set of this version of Orthanc is considered as complete. No new feature should be added. If important bugfixes are necessary, they will lead to subsequent releases 1.0.x. Future development will take place in branches with versions above 1.1.0. The latest important feature to be included in Orthanc was the support of DICOM modality worklists, both as a client and as a server. Serving worklists is done through the plugin infrastructure of Orthanc. The rationale for using plugins is that worklists are generated by mechanisms that live outside the DICOM world (e.g. HL7 or FHIR messages), and that are specific to each clinical workflow. Creating plugins allow to make the Orthanc core independent of these mechanisms. Note that for basic uses, we provide a sample worklist plugin, that reads its worklists from some directory on the filesystem (which mimics the "dcmwlm" tool from DCMTK). We are now starting to work on future evolutions of Orthanc. These evolutions will notably span more specialized applications (e.g. the support of DICOM-RT for radiotherapy and nuclear medicine, or the support of DICOM for digital pathology), more advanced user interfaces (as the built-in Orthanc Explorer only targets administrative, low-level purpose), and smoother interfacing with external computing environments (e.g. a revamped native C++ SDK, a virtual FUSE filesystem, an embedded FTP server, or extensions to well-known tools such as OsiriX or Slicer). These are just a few tracks, and most of them became possible thank to the introduction of the rich plugin infrastructure inside Orthanc. Once again, we want to thank the entire Orthanc community for your interest, for providing great feedback, and for helping us to validate the product in real-word environments. If you want to further support Orthanc, please fill the short survey below. We are also ready to discuss about possible research collaborations. Cheers,

Sébastien-

Survey: Who Uses Orthanc?

July 31st, 2015

The Orthanc project is continuously growing. To support its development, we would love to hear which hospitals, universities, companies and organizations take advantage of Orthanc. Please let us know by sending a short mail!

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To put weight on future grant applications for travels/hardware/servers/..., we wish to gather a list of institutions that use Orthanc for production, for quality assurance, or for R&D purpose. These institutions will be publicly listed on this Web site, in a separate "Orthanc Users" section. If you wish to support Orthanc, please use the following pre-filled mail, ideally attaching your institution's official logo: Answer survey »

Orthanc Celebrates its Third Birthday

July 20th, 2015

The Orthanc project is now three years old. The last year was exceptionally rich for this free and open-source project. It's time for a short survey!

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Since July 2014, 8 releases of Orthanc have been successively published, jumping from version 0.8.0 to 0.9.1. Besides many extensions to the REST API and massive refactoring, here is a brief summary of the main features that were integrated over the last months: A lightweight Web-based viewer of medical images is now available as a plugin to Orthanc.

of medical images is now available as a plugin to Orthanc. The default SQLite engine can be replaced by an entreprise-ready database back-end based upon PostgreSQL , thanks to the powerful plugin mechanism of Orthanc.

, thanks to the powerful plugin mechanism of Orthanc. A DICOM Query/Retrieve client is now natively accessible from Orthanc Explorer, the embedded Web user interface of Orthanc.

is now natively accessible from Orthanc Explorer, the embedded Web user interface of Orthanc. Lua scripting is getting very powerful, with full access to the REST API of Orthanc.

is getting very powerful, with full access to the REST API of Orthanc. For medical physicists doing quality control of imaging modalities, an extension is available for ImageJ to easily download DICOM images from Orthanc. Very importantly, the year 2015 is marked by two awards for Orthanc: Sébastien, Orthanc's author, was given the Award for the Advancement of Free Software by the Free Software Foundation .

. The University Hospital of Liège won the Best eHealth Project Award for the Orthanc project from Agoria, the Belgian federation of the technology industry. The Orthanc roadmap continues to be strongly influenced by the feedback from its growing community. Nicely, the feature set for the long-awaited stable 1.0.0 release is now getting well-defined. This release should be available in the next few months. Thanks for your support,

Sébastien-

Illustrations of Orthanc in Action

Februrary 2nd, 2015

Following our talk at FOSDEM 2015 about free and open-source software for medical imaging, discover some media illustrating Orthanc in action.

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Click on the image to show screenshots of Orthanc.

Demonstration of the upcoming plugin that extends Orthanc with a Web viewer of medical images. Tutorial that shows how to import DICOM images using the Web interface of Orthanc.

Medical physicists can import DICOM images directly from Orthanc into ImageJ. Learn more. Experimental viewer of nuclear medicine images that is built upon Orthanc. Learn more.



Orthanc Celebrates its Second Birthday

July 18th, 2014

The first public release of Orthanc was on July 19th, 2012. Today, we are ready to celebrate its second birthday! It is time for a brief review of the past year.

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Orthanc to be Even More Open

June 19th, 2014 (updated on July 11th, 2014)

Orthanc 0.8.0 features the possibility for external developers to create and distribute plugins for Orthanc, thanks to the Orthanc Plugin SDK.

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