I would like to express my deep and sincere gratitude to Sébastien Jodogne, as well as everybody who has contributed to the development of Orthanc, for this great software. I clearly understand that some of you may laugh at my use case, but I will still share it. I am neither a doctor nor an imaging technician, nor any other type of healthcare professional or an IT guy; I am just a patient who has to undergo MRI, CT, X-ray, etc. in various situations. There are reasons why I have to get scannned on quite a regular basis: I have been experiencing problems with my spine and other parts of my body for decades. E.g. in 2014, I was seriously wounded in combat, with my left humerus fractured by a Kalashnikov bullet, when defending my country, Ukraine (and I am defending it again now, having joined the army ranks voluntarily in May 2022, after the full-scale Russian invasion). Then later I became an avid cyclist, and I was hit by a car in Norway in 2018, during an ultra long distance cycling event, NorthCape4000; I had my spine and scull broken in several places, my knees injured, etc. I have also had various other injuries and diseases that require diagnostic imaging from time to time.
My relatives have also had health problems that require imaging, so now I have even more of those CDs and DVDs with DICOM folders. I have copied those data to my laptop, and when I visit doctors who do not have remote access to those imaging facilities where the scans were made, or I bring my relatives for a consultation, I just quickly open the laptop and show the imaging results to the doctor. Oftentimes, the doctor would like to see both new and old results, to see how the condition develops.
As a result, the total volume of my and my relatives’ imaging archives has reached something like 50 GB, with dozens of studies, in various modalities, and for various parts of the body. There are dozens of DICOM top-level folders with thousands of subfolders, and tens of thousands of files. I have developed a naming system for those folders (their names to include dates in a unified format etc.). However, at some point in time, I realized that I would like to bring all those results into a single structured database, with search, filtering etc. I quickly saw that the proper way to do it would be to install a local PACS server on my laptop.
While I am not an IT professional (as I already said), I do know quite a bit about IT, and I do have quite some experience of installing and using various types of software for various needs that I and my relatives and friends have from time to time, including databases, content management systems, web servers, etc. So, using Google search, I found three free PACS servers and tried them. The first one was Conquest. It can generally do what I wanted to do, but it physically copies all files into its folder, while I would prefer to also keep the source folders and files in their original structure. (It seems that Conquest can index external folders, but it would need more efforts than achieving it with Orthanc.) It means a lot of duplication. Then I tried Sante Free PACS Server; it looks nice but it cannot e.g. edit patient IDs (sometimes I would like to do it in order to have it in a unified form across various studies, and to be able to do it, I would have to purchase PACS server software from Sante for something like USD 2000). Finally, I tried Orthanc, and it works like a miracle :). It indexes DICOM files from existing external folders without physically copying them, it can edit IDs and descriptions (imaging people sometimes forget to enter those), etc. To make it short, it does everything I need, making the maintenance of my imaging archive really easy and convenient.
Thank you again for creating Orthanc. While I cannot donate right now (there are many urgent things for which we need to spend our financial resources), I do hope to be able to send some donation later.
Kind regards,
Maksym