Medical Imaging Ecosystem : OHIF

Open Health Imaging Fondation (OHIF) is an open-source software project to create a framework for medical image viewers.

GaelO uses OHIF to develop its imaging viewers. Pixilib wants to become an active contributor to OHIF.

OHIF is a viewer of innovative technologies, which has succeeded in combining web technologies with maximum performance in terms of imaging visualization.

The arrival of DICOM web viewers dates back to a decade ago. However, until now, web viewers have simply been web clients that display images prepared on the server side. This architecture has major drawbacks: Each time the slice or the viewing window is changed, a new image is prepared on the server side and transmitted to the client, which creates a perceptible latency at each action. However, these Web viewers have had the advantage of bringing portability, so it has become possible to view images without any software installation via a simple browser.

These Web viewers have become a must in the field of patient portals and allow satisfactory visualization of images for non-professional users (visualization of images by patients, punctual visualization for iconographic purposes for clinicians...)

However, because of their limitations in terms of image processing and their latency, imaging physicians (Radiologists, Nuclear Physicians, Radiotherapists) largely prefer viewers installed on their client workstations with a local image reconstruction offering more functionalities and performances.

OHIF has successfully bridged the gap between the two worlds by proposing a viewer based on web technologies that perform all the image processing using the client's hardware resources.

OHIF allows portability; only a browser is needed to interpret the images and an unmatched performance by optimizing the use of hardware resources such as GPU acceleration.

To top it off, OHIF is an open-source project, and we love open source!

Pixilib will have a long history with OHIF. We have already contributed to the development of the OHIF PET/CT viewer, and we will continue to work hand in hand with OHIF for many years.

We will soon recruit an engineer who will be dedicated to the development of OHIF and who will create viewers dedicated to our clinical studies, and who will be an active contributor to the OHIF project to accelerate this new page in medical imaging.