I am currently studying the feasibility of using the OpenEMR as a RIS manager. For this I need to clarify some points that I could not see fulfill going through the wiki. Namely whether or not there is support for structured reports according to DICOMSR standard, if it’s necessary to use an external DICOM viewer to visualize the medical images and if there is some kind of webservice that allows export the information enabling interoperability with other systems.
Images in OpenEMR can be stored in filesystem or in CouchDB. The index is available in documents table. I am not aware of any webservice but with few line of code you can add needed information to CouchDB and you have complete access to the images.
First of all thank you for the help. So that’s a way to store de medical images, but how does the staff use then, what i mean is, they need a DICOM viewer to see then.
And how about DICOM Strutured reports is there a way to support then ?
We can save the DICOM images in OpenEMR documents. But to view the DICOM images, we could use RadScaper opensource DICOM viewer. We have done this long time back, by customizing OpenEMR and radscaper applet implementation.
Thank you for the help, i really appreciate it.
With the aswers above i’m pretty much enlightened oh the DICOM viewer situation.
But unfortunately i still have some questions regarding the interoperability between diferente systems, for what i understand there is no way to export the information ( webservices ) for other system using DICOM standard rigth ? And the possibility of using strutured reports, in other words DICOM SR standard ?
As we explained in our PDF (you mentioned), we have implemented the DICOM viewer. We have configured the Mirth channel, to integrate with multiple labs to get the images and save them. And also customized OpenEMR to list the images and on clicking the link, the DICOM image can be viewed in the Radscaper.
We have also customized OpenEMR to manually upload the DICOM(.dcm) files and on clicking the same, we can view in Radscaper.
The Mirth channel can interpret the DICOMSR format. This is not yet integrated with OpenEMR. But OpenEMR can be customized to support the DICOMSR format by using Mirth. The required informations from the DICOM Structured Report can be interpreted and displayed in OpenEMR as per the requirement.
This is also a milestone. I don’t think this would be hard to do. Most likely a Mirth server is not needed.
Currently the dicom viewer works pretty well with needing to add extraction of the embedded info about the dicom image. Not hard as well.
This feature is something that most all providers/practices want but, nobody has stepped up with some sponsorship!
Nope Sherwin. That’d be no different that downloading images from the radiology/labs.
Our biggest issue now is decoding image info(patient demos, image type, which view etc) and displaying in documents along with image view.
I know this is very important to users but simply haven’t had time to do.
Oh, user can zip up all the images and import into OpenEMR documents as a zip of all views relating to the patient and their circumstances eg MRI, CT or xray etc.
https://www.pacssoft.com/?pspacs
Here is a free pacs server. MyFreePACS was a free web-based radiology image storage and viewing tool developed at Children’s Hospital Seattle by PACSsoft members.
I am willing to sponsor, especially if you “don’t think this would be too hard to do.”
I know @MatthewVita was active with this a few years ago. Appreciate any help you have in pointing me in the right direction to bring this needed functionality to OEMR.
Okay i’ll see what I can do to get the views embedded info to view in documents first, then i’ll see about allowing upload of the procedure master file and decoding it.
Will definitely bring back to v502.
If satisfied, just make a donation to OpenEMR to help with some bills and thanks.
Most labs will give you an approved free viewer and free accounts for downloading DICOM images and directory tree.
Instead of a dedicated server a better option may be adding feature to setup a lab provider and sftp all available procedure/views from radiology/lab from patient documents. We could file parse, zip, save and view with a button push…
I believe this was what Matt was working towards. It looks pretty good and will see how hard it would be to integrate when I finished up the viewer integration.
