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The introduction of digital technologies in the medical imaging field and of PACS (Picture Archiving and Communications System) in the hospitals is causing deep changes in the way the medical image is used and distributed. Today, the specialized physician often performs his diagnosis by analyzing one or more medical images displayed on a diagnostic monitor, instead of looking at a radiographic film mounted on a diaphanoscope.
A typical PACS installation provides for viewing stations in several rooms of the hospitals: a viewing station usually consists of a Personal Computer or a Workstation powered by a dedicated software for the display, analysis and manipulation of DICOM (Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine) standard-compliant medical images. The installation and maintenance of such a software is usually quite expensive, since normally it is a complex application that needs to be installed locally on every host acting as viewing station. This station, connected to the DICOM network, is able to retrieve the medical images either from the local hard drive or from a remote dedicated archive present on the DICOM network.
There are situations in which it could be useful to be able to display the medical images even outside the boundaries of the hospital's DICOM network, perhaps by a common Personal Computer with basic software installed. RemotEye is a DICOM image viewer allowing to display DICOM images that physically are remote with respect to the viewing site and that are reachable through the Internet or Intranet networks.
RemotEye is a web-based DICOM image viewer which allows displaying DICOM studies that are physically remote with respect to the viewing site and that are reachable through the Internet or Intranet networks. It allows retrieving medical images created by hospital's modalities and stored into digital image archives, displaying them in several different ways and performing advanced Image Processing operations on them.
RemotEye can be easily integrated in a Web-based DICOM-compliant system: it is based on the Java Applet and Java Web Start technologies, and it has been designed specifically for being integrated into third party's Web Applications.
RemotEye now also supports a new integration mechanism, based on the HTTP and XML standards. This mechanism is particularly suitable when RemotEye shall be configured as the viewing front-end for a DICOM back-end system or archive. In this mode, RemotEye sends queries to the back-end through the HTTP protocol, based on the search parameters entered by the user in the search window. After performing a query on the DICOM storage archive, the server will send XML-formatted answers to RemotEye, containing the matching patients, studies, series and images. RemotEye will now be able to retrieve and display the relevant studies and series, as requested by the user, even using compression techniques. In order to better support this new integration mode, RemotEye is now also able to execute as a Java Web Start application, in addition to as a Java Applet.
With its great flexibility and its high number of configuration parameters, RemotEye is the perfect choice for application developers and system integrators who are looking for an add-on providing advanced DICOM viewing and image processing capabilities to their medical document management Web Application or Web-based PACS.
On the other side, if you are a final user and you are interested in a complete web-based PACS solution, please click here to take a look at how RemotEye can be used in combination with web PACS.
The RemotEye DICOM viewer can be executed inside a common Web browser (Java Applet mode) or used as a light-weight web client application (Java Web Start mode), thus enabling a user with a common Personal Computer and no specific software installed to view and process both remote and local DICOM images. Thanks to the Java technology, both the client side and the server side of the RemotEye system are compatible with a variety of platforms, including Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, Solaris.
Here is a possible usage scenario: a physician (enabled to view the medical images stored into the hospital's department archive) may view the medical images wherever he is, both inside and outside the institution or the DICOM network. He only needs a common Personal Computer (for instance, a Notebook), a Web browser (e.g., Internet Explorer or Netscape Navigator) and an Internet / Intranet connection. If he owns sufficient credentials, he will be able to access the Web Application and, thanks to RemotEye, to display the relevant medical images. The Java Applet technology significantly simplifies the software maintenance and update: RemotEye is downloaded from the network every time it is executed on the client PC. Hence, it is sufficient to update the software on the Web Server and this update will be automatically reflected on all clients.
Thanks to the PACSConnector software option, RemotEye can now be deployed as a "ready-to-use" solution, without requiring development of custom integrations for a specific DICOM server or archive.
Searching for patients and studies, sending DICOM files to server, reporting, downloading and displaying images from server and all operations typically supported by RemotEye are now available through the special module developed by NeoLogica: PACSConnector.
PACSConnector works as a bridge between the DICOM server (PACS) and the RemotEye client, implementing the DICOM protocol on one side, and the RemotEye-specific HTTP/XML protocol on the other side.
PACSConnector is provided with an easy-to-use web interface, through which it is possible to set all parameters necessary for its proper functioning. Once the simple intial configuration phase is complete, it will be immediately possible to interact with the PACS server (either WADO-compliant or not) from the RemotEye web client, without further complications. PACSConnector will take care of the DICOM communication with the PACS, as well as of the communication with the RemotEye client.
PACSConnector also implements an effective users management mechanism, supporting different privileges for each user. This allows controlling web access to PACS in a proper way.
