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. Stone is able to
display DICOM series without having to entirely store them in the RAM.

Stone of Orthanc 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.


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 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/


Installation and usage
----------------------

Build instructions are similar to that of Orthanc:
https://orthanc.chu.ulg.ac.be/book/faq/compiling.html

Stone of Orthanc comes with several sample applications in the
"Samples" folder. These samples use SDL.


Licensing
---------

Stone of Orthanc is licensed under the GPLv3 license, with the OpenSSL
exception:
http://people.gnome.org/~markmc/openssl-and-the-gpl.html

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:

@inproceedings{Jodogne:ISBI2013,
  author = {Jodogne, S. and Bernard, C. and Devillers, M. and Lenaerts, E. and Coucke, P.},
  title = {Orthanc -- {A} Lightweight, {REST}ful {DICOM} Server for Healthcare and Medical Research},
  booktitle={Biomedical Imaging ({ISBI}), {IEEE} 10th International Symposium on}, 
  year={2013}, 
  pages={190-193}, 
  ISSN={1945-7928},
  month=apr,
  url={http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/articleDetails.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6556444},
  address={San Francisco, {CA}, {USA}}
}