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+Stone of Orthanc
+================
+
+General Information
+-------------------
+
+This repository contains the source code of the Stone of Orthanc.
+
+Stone of Orthanc is a lightweight, cross-platform C++ framework for
+the CPU-based rendering of medical images. It notably features support
+for MPR (multiplanar reconstruction of volume images), PET-CT fusion,
+and accurate physical world coordinates.
+
+Stone of Orthanc comes bundled with its own software-based rendering
+engine (based upon pixman). This engine will use CPU hardware
+acceleration if available (notably SSE2, SSSE3, and NEON instruction
+sets), but not the GPU. This makes Stone a highly versatile framework
+that can run even on low-performance platforms. Note that Stone is
+able to display DICOM series without having to entirely store them in
+the RAM (i.e. frame by frame).
+
+Thanks to its standalone rendering engine, Stone of Orthanc is also
+compatible with any GUI framework (such as Qt, wxWidgets, MFC...). The
+provided sample applications use the SDL framework.
+
+Stone is conceived as a companion toolbox to the Orthanc VNA (vendor
+neutral archive, i.e. DICOM server). As a consequence, Stone will
+smoothly interface with Orthanc out of the box. Interestingly, Stone
+does not contain any DICOM toolkit: It entirely relies on the REST API
+of Orthanc to parse/decode DICOM images. However, thanks to the
+object-oriented architecture of Stone, it is possible to avoid this
+dependency upon Orthanc, e.g. to download DICOM datasets using
+DICOMweb.
+
+
+Comparison
+----------
+
+Pay attention to the fact that Stone of Orthanc is a toolkit, and not
+a fully-featured application for the visualization of medical images
+(such as Horos/OsiriX or Ginkgo CADx). However, such applications
+can be built on the top of Stone of Orthanc.
+
+Stone of Orthanc is quite similar to two other well-known toolkits:
+
+* Cornerstone, a client-side JavaScript toolkit to display medical
+  images in Web browsers, by Chris Hafey <chafey@gmail.com>:
+  https://github.com/chafey/cornerstone
+
+  Contrarily to Cornerstone, Stone of Orthanc can be embedded into
+  native, heavyweight applications.
+
+* VTK, a C++ toolkit for scientific visualization, by Kitware:
+  http://www.vtk.org/
+
+  Contrarily to VTK, Stone of Orthanc is focused on CPU-based, 2D
+  rendering: The GPU will not be used.
+
+
+Dependencies
+------------
+
+Stone of Orthanc is based upon the following projects:
+
+* Orthanc, a lightweight Vendor Neutral Archive (DICOM server):
+  http://www.orthanc-server.com/
+
+* Cairo and pixman, a cross-platform 2D graphics library:
+  https://www.cairographics.org/
+
+* Optionally, SDL, a cross-platform multimedia library:
+  https://www.libsdl.org/
+
+Prerequisites to compile natively on Ubuntu: 
+```
+sudo apt-get install -y libcairo-dev libpixman-1-dev libsdl2-dev
+```
+
+The emscripten SDK is required for the WASM build. Please install it
+in `~/apps/emsdk`. If you wish to use it in another way, please edit
+the `build-wasm.sh` file.
+
+Installation and usage ----------------------
+
+Build instructions are similar to that of Orthanc:
+https://orthanc.chu.ulg.ac.be/book/faq/compiling.html
+
+Usage details are available as part of the Orthanc Book:
+http://book.orthanc-server.com/developers/stone.html
+
+Stone of Orthanc comes with several sample applications in the
+`Samples` folder. These samples can be compiled into Web Assembly or
+into native SDL applications.
+
+The following assumes that the source code to be downloaded in
+`~/orthanc-stone` and Orthanc source code to be checked out in
+`~/orthanc`. 
+
+Building the WASM samples
+-------------------------------------
+```
+cd ~/orthanc-stone/Applications/Samples
+./build-wasm.sh
+```
+
+Serving the WASM samples
+------------------------------------
+```
+# launch an Orthanc listening on 8042 port:
+Orthanc
+
+# launch an nginx that will serve the WASM static files and reverse
+# proxy
+sudo nginx -p $(pwd) -c nginx.local.conf
+```
+
+You can now open the samples in http://localhost:9977
+
+Building the SDL native samples (SimpleViewer only)
+---------------------------------------------------
+
+The following also assumes that you have checked out the Orthanc
+source code in an `orthanc` folder next to the Stone of Orthanc
+repository, please enter the following:
+
+```
+mkdir -p ~/builds/orthanc-stone-build
+cd ~/builds/orthanc-stone-build
+cmake -DORTHANC_FRAMEWORK_SOURCE=path \
+    -DORTHANC_FRAMEWORK_ROOT=$currentDir/../../../orthanc \
+    -DALLOW_DOWNLOADS=ON -DENABLE_SDL=ON \
+    ~/orthanc-stone/Applications/Samples/
+```
+
+If you are working on Windows, add the correct generator option to
+cmake to, for instance, generate msbuild files for Visual Studio.
+
+Then, under Linux:
+```
+cmake --build . --target OrthancStoneSimpleViewer -- -j 5
+```
+
+Note: replace `$($pwd)` with the current directory when not using Powershell
+
+Building the Qt native samples (SimpleViewer only) under Windows:
+------------------------------------------------------------------
+For instance, if Qt is installed in `C:\Qt\5.12.0\msvc2017_64`
+
+`cmake -DSTATIC_BUILD=ON -DCMAKE_PREFIX_PATH=C:\Qt\5.12.0\msvc2017_64 -DORTHANC_FRAMEWORK_SOURCE=path -DORTHANC_FRAMEWORK_ROOT="$($pwd)\..\orthanc" -DALLOW_DOWNLOADS=ON -DENABLE_QT=ON -G "Visual Studio 15 2017 Win64" ../orthanc-stone/Applications/Samples/`
+
+Note: replace `$($pwd)` with the current directory when not using Powershell
+
+
+Building the SDL native samples (SimpleViewer only) under Windows:
+------------------------------------------------------------------
+`cmake -DSTATIC_BUILD=ON -DORTHANC_FRAMEWORK_SOURCE=path -DORTHANC_FRAMEWORK_ROOT="$($pwd)\..\orthanc" -DALLOW_DOWNLOADS=ON -DENABLE_SDL=ON -G "Visual Studio 15 2017 Win64" ../orthanc-stone/Applications/Samples/`
+
+Note: replace `$($pwd)` with the current directory when not using Powershell
+
+Executing the native samples:
+--------------------------------
+```
+# launch an Orthanc listening on 8042 port:
+Orthanc
+
+# launch the sample
+./OrthancStoneSimpleViewer --studyId=XX
+``` 
+
+Licensing
+---------
+
+Stone of Orthanc is licensed under the AGPL license.
+
+We also kindly ask scientific works and clinical studies that make
+use of Orthanc to cite Orthanc in their associated publications.
+Similarly, we ask open-source and closed-source products that make
+use of Orthanc to warn us about this use. You can cite our work
+using the following BibTeX entry:
+
+@Article{Jodogne2018,
+  author="Jodogne, S{\'e}bastien",
+  title="The {O}rthanc Ecosystem for Medical Imaging",
+  journal="Journal of Digital Imaging",
+  year="2018",
+  month="Jun",
+  day="01",
+  volume="31",
+  number="3",
+  pages="341--352",
+  issn="1618-727X",
+  doi="10.1007/s10278-018-0082-y",
+  url="https://doi.org/10.1007/s10278-018-0082-y"
+}