Stone Web Viewer plugin

Contents

• Stone Web Viewer plugin

  • How to get it

  • Usage

  • Advanced options

  • Troubleshooting

  • FAQ

This plugin extends Orthanc with a Web viewer of medical images, with more advanced features than the basic Orthanc Web viewer plugin.

Check out the demonstration server.

For researchers: Please cite this paper.

How to get it

The Stone Web viewer is part of the Windows installers (since release 20.12.0 of the installers).

For GNU/Linux users, the Stone Web viewer is part of the official Docker images. Precompiled LSB binaries (Linux Standard Base) are available as well.

The compilation process is quite complex since it requires using the Emscripten compiler toolchain. The full build instructions are available in the source code.

Usage

On Microsoft Windows or if you are using the jodogne/orthanc-plugins Docker images, the plugin is enabled by default and will work out-of-the-box.

The orthancteam/orthanc Docker images are more suited to devops needs, as they allow to start a minimal Docker environment as follows:

$ docker run -p 4242:4242 -p 8042:8042 -e STONE_WEB_VIEWER_PLUGIN_ENABLED=true -e DICOM_WEB_PLUGIN_ENABLED=true --rm orthancteam/orthanc:21.6.2

On plain GNU/Linux distributions (i.e. if not using Docker), the Stone Web viewer will only work with the LSB binaries (Linux Standard Base) of the Orthanc server that can be downloaded from here (this setup will work with most recent GNU/Linux distributions). The Stone Web viewer also requires the DICOMweb plugin to be installed.

Once the binaries are installed, you must change the configuration file to tell Orthanc where it can find the plugin: This is done by properly modifying the Plugins option. You could for instance use the following configuration file:

{
  "Name" : "MyOrthanc",
  [...]
  "Plugins" : [
    "/home/user/xxx/Downloads/libStoneWebViewer.so",
    "/home/user/xxx/Downloads/libOrthancDicomWeb.so"
  ]
}

Orthanc must of course be restarted after the modification of its configuration file.

Once a DICOM study is opened using Orthanc Explorer, a yellow button entitled Stone Web Viewer will show up. It will open the Web viewer for that particular study. See also the interactive demonstration on the official homepage of the plugin.

Advanced options

• The configuration of the Web viewer can be fine-tuned by adapting some advanced options in the configuration file.

• The source distribution of the Stone Web viewer contains a NOTES.txt file that discusses the differences with the Osimis Web viewer as well as advanced features of the software (opening multiple studies, authorization, display of OsiriX annotations…).

• Also, check out our TODO file that is used to track future features.

Troubleshooting

• Some users have reported that some versions of Google Chrome and Chromium (in particular release 97.0.4692.71) don’t properly support drag-and-drop. This is not an issue in Stone Web viewer, but an issue in Chrome/Chromium (cf. issue 1284605). This problem can be overcome in 3 different ways:

  1. Upgrade your Web browser (releases >= 98.0.x should run fine).

  2. Replace drag-and-drop by clicking on the “drop a series here” area, then clicking on the series you want to load.

  3. Disable the option “Use system title bar and borders” in the settings of Chrome/Chromium, as depicted in the following screenshot:

     

FAQ

• Can I use the Stone Viewer in a medical environment?

  The Stone Viewer is not a Medical Device; it is not CE marked or FDA approved. The Stone Viewer is free and open-source software that cannot be used for diagnostic or therapeutic purposes.

  However, the viewer can be used as a communication tool that allows researchers, teachers, technicians, medical physicists, general practitioner or patients to visualize medical images for information only.

  Check out your local regulations to ensure you’re using it in a legal manner.

• Can the Stone Web Viewer display DICOM-SR (structured reports)?

  The Stone Web viewer doesn’t provide built-in support for DICOM-SR. However, it can display DICOM-SR that have been beforehand converted to PDF.

  To this end, you could for instance first use the dsr2html command-line tool that is provided by the DCMTK project to convert the structured report to HTML, then use a HTML-to-PDF converter such as wkhtmltopdf, and finally convert the PDF to DICOM using the /tools/create-dicom route in the REST API of Orthanc. It would be easy to automate this workflow using a Python plugin or a Java plugin.

  If you have an interest in DICOM-SR, the Orthanc community would love to have access to sample DICOM files that could be used to enhance the support of structured reports in the Stone Web viewer. If you have such sample files, please post them to the Orthanc Users discussion forum.

• What video formats are supported by the Stone Web Viewer?

  The set of codecs supported by the Stone Viewer is an intersection of the sets of codecs supported by the DICOM standard and those supported by the web browsers. In short, this mostly comes down to just MPEG-4.

  Note that video playing is not supported using the plain DICOMweb protocol: The Stone Web viewer will use the REST API of Orthanc to play videos.

• How do Osimis Web viewer and Stone Web viewer compare?

  The two viewers use a very similar user interface. However, their internal architecture is totally different:

  • Stone Web viewer is a combination of C++, Stone of Orthanc, WebAssembly, DICOMweb and Vue.js.

  • Osimis Web viewer is a combination of JavaScript, Cornerstone, Orthanc REST API and Angular.

  The Osimis Web viewer is deprecated and superseded by the Stone Web viewer, as the Stone of Orthanc library allows to use a single C++ codebase between mobile apps, desktop software and Web applications.

  Some features from the Osimis Web viewer are not available (yet), such as creating custom annotations or the Live Share feature.

• How can I migrate from Osimis Web viewer to Stone Web viewer?

  Full instructions are provided in the source distribution.

• What are the future plans?

  The internal use of Stone of Orthanc library gives us a lot of flexibility to implement new advanced features, such as 3D rendering (MPR, reslicing, image fusion…), DICOM-RT support, storage of annotations/measurements, viewer for mobile devices, internationalization (translation)…

  We are looking for industrial sponsors to implement such new features in the Stone Web viewer.