High Resolution Medical Image Display Through a Zero Footprint Application

Abstract

In the last few years there has been an increasing interest in the acquisition of medical images stored and distributed through PACS (Picture Archiving and Communication Systems). Also, several tools for remote diagnosis have arisen; therefore, Web-PACS have been proposed for image handling. However, most web browsers are unable to visualize DICOM (Digital Imaging and Communication in Medicine) images in its native format, consequently browsers
require some application to be installed on the web client.
In this work, the development of a web viewer for DICOM images is presented. The viewer can run in any browser that supports HTML5, without any previous installation (zero-footprint viewer). A progressive transmission scheme is considered to minimize the image visualization time, and to assure its diagnostic quality. The performance of the progressive image transmission algorithm has been evaluated by means of the Time-To-Display metric.