OSIRIX: An Open Source Platform for Advanced Multimodality Medical Imaging

The rapid evolution of digital imaging techniques and the increasing number of multidimensional and multimodality studies constitute a challenge for digital imaging workstations and image analysis programs. While web-based solutions have emerged as simple ways for wide distribution of images they often lack the necessary tools for advanced image processing and 3D visualization. The increases in performance of personal computers allow implementing complex image processing and visualization tools on standard off-the-shelf hardware. OSIRIX is a fully interactive image navigation and visualization software was designed for display and analysis of large sets of three dimensional medical images. The program is specifically designed to handle new generations of multi-modality imaging data combining anatomical and metabolic images such as PET/CT. It also provides dynamic display for time-varying images such as cardiac motion or metabolic functional studies. Designed by a team of radiologists it provides an intuitive and user friendly user interface tailored for physicians that are not familiar with complex image processing and manipulation techniques. The OSIRIX software package runs as an independent application and handles its own image study database that is updated automatically when new images are downloaded. Images can be pushed from the PACS using a DICOM interface and can also be `Pulled" by a DICOM query-retrieve function of the program. Image files can also be manually copied from off-line media or from other network sources. The visualization software provides all the basic image manipulation functions of zoom, pan, intensity adjustment, filtering with an incredibly fast real-time performance.