Is Orthanc right for my project?

Google Groups archive
1

For background, our study involves taking ultrasound images from two sites (Zambia and United States), and after capturing the images on the ultrasound machines, we need a way to form the images into a queue, curate them, remove patient health information (if any remains in the image or metadata), store them for later analysis, and lastly upload them to the cloud for public access. Orthanc seems like a program that may be able to assist with some or all of this process.

My question is - are there any of these tasks that Orthanc will not be able to assist with (and thus we need to find either an alternative or complementary program?) Are there any considerations in using data from institutions located in different countries when upload data to Orrthanc? Do images uploaded to Orthanc need to be first placed in the hospital PACS system (as the hospitals each already have their own PACS system), before being transferred into Orthanc? Would Orthanc allow us to de-identify data, or would it be wise only enter anonymized data prior to moving it into Orthanc?

Thanks to anybody for your help!

Alan

2

Dear Alan,

I will try to give you my opinion

  • are there any of these tasks that Orthanc will not be able to assist with (and thus we need to find either an alternative or complementary program?)
    Yes, the Image processing part, if you need to edit the image pixel itself or doing image processing, Orthanc is not an Image processing software, consider other software for this part, ImageJ, 3D slicer etc

  • Are there any considerations in using data from institutions located in different countries when upload data to Orrthanc?
    Check if you have legal issue but technically not so much.

-Do images uploaded to Orthanc need to be first placed in the hospital PACS system (as the hospitals each already have their own PACS system), before being transferred into Orthanc?
No, you can import the dcm files directly into Orthanc with the upload function

  • Would Orthanc allow us to de-identify data, or would it be wise only enter anonymized data prior to moving it into Orthanc?
    Yes, Orthanc is extremly good for data de-identification.

Your goal is complex to achieve.
I’m currently working in a plugin using Orthanc to load, Anonymize and share DICOM (Orthanc peer, FTP or Webdav).
Take a look here :
http://www.petctviewer.org/images/Anonymization_guideline.pdf

and
https://github.com/salimkanoun/Orthanc_Tools

Best regards,

Salim

3

One additional thing to note, which I believe Salim was referring to on his first comment, is that although Orthanc can de-identify within the tags, many US images have identification within the images themselves which would need to be removed. This is not done in Orthanc and you should verify if this is a requirement with your US images. If so, additional work will need to be done.

4

Totally,

In Fiji (ImageJ) we have a possibility to edit the image (ex removing patient indentification pixel area) and re-create DICOM but it will have to be done manually.