[A visual displayer for publishing radiologic images on the World Wide Web]

Abstract

Purpose: To present a software suitable for publication of medical images on the World Wide Web and compatible with both the DICOM and other popular formats like GIF and JPEG.

Materials and methods: DICOM viewer is a Java applet, written in Java 1.0. The tool offers the capability to publish medical images, to modify brightness and contrast (windowing) and to magnify the picture (magnification lens). Information related to the image is available for consultation only for DICOM images.

Results: The viewer was tested with many DICOM files, generated by our PACS or downloaded from Internet. It works well with the DICOM 3.0 file format, but correct functioning is not granted for previous releases. The software was compatible with all the most popular Web browsers (MS Internet Explorer 3.0 or newer, Netscape Navigator 4.5 or newer, Sun and HotJava) and it works well in Windows, Sun Solaris. Macintosh, Windows CE. A 512 kb image (a standard MR image) requires about 5 seconds to be shown on an Intel Pentium II PC with 32 Mbyte RAM connected on a 10 Mbit/s Ethernet network. About 3 seconds are needed to download the file and about 2 seconds to display the image. Windowing and zooming are quick enough.

Conclusions: The applet allows to publish DICOM medical images directly on the World Wide Web, without converting them into another graphical format. Moreover, it supplies some image processing tools common in the radiological environment. The viewer characteristics make it suitable for preparing teaching radiology sites or clinical files on the Web. The viewer's performance is somewhat poor, particularly on the Internet. Better performances are achieved on local area network (intranet). To improve performance, we will introduce file compression and rewrite the software in Java 1.1. The software is available from the author free of charge.