Orthanc for telemedicine use

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1

I am looking at using Orthanc for telemedicine. I am not familiar with DICOM servers but I wondered If I install it on my Windows 10 PC at home, could the ultrasound images at the remote clinics be transferred to my home PC directly from their ultrasound machines if they are connected to their broadband network via an ethernet cable?
None of these clinics are connected to PACS servers and normally just store their images locally on their ultrasound machines' hard drive.
I would then download a DICOM reader on my PC to be able to read the images.
Hope this makes sense - any advice gratefully received.
Jan

2

Dear Jan,

The DICOM protocol used by the ultrasound machines is inherently Intranet-oriented. You should never expose it over Internet for security reasons.

You basically have 3 possibilities:

  • Configure a VPN so that your computer at home virtually becomes part of Intranet of the remote clinics. This is an expensive solution, and your network administrator will certainly not allow it as it might introduce security breaches.
  • Configure an Orthanc server within the remote clinics, with a Web viewer enabled (either Orthanc’s viewer or Osimis’ viewer: http://book.orthanc-server.com/plugins.html#index-of-the-official-plugins), and access it over Internet.
  • If you want to transfer the DICOM files from the clinics to your home computer and manipulate it with an heavyweight DICOM viewer (to go beyond simple remote viewing), use the Orthanc peers or DICOMweb API.
    In either case, you will have to ask support from your network administrator to setup the solution. You might also have an interest in Osimis’ Lify solution (https://lify.io/).

HTH,
Sébastien-

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Hi Sébastien

Thanks very much for your response and helpful suggestions.

Jan