We use a web based EMR that includes all patient DICOM images. From this web based interface we have all the information possible about those images where they exist in a PACS how to grab them through WADO and any DICOM attributes required.

But what we need is an application that we can instruct to open the images or a set of images for detailed viewing and interaction.

The ideal scenario is as follows:

Image Viewer supports a special document type.

This document type is configured in the browser so that when the browser receives these documents they get passed to the Image Viewer.

These documents contain information on what images are desired to be loaded and where the images can be found. This document type should be able specify the following sorts of sources:

1) Local Image Files
2) Image files located in a specified pacs
3) Image files available from a WADO url

The Image Viewer should start very quickly read the document passed and then display studies requested in document.

If the Image Viewer is already running it should process additional documents by adding images specified in documents passed.

Do you have anything that can support the above concept? Can the existing ClearCanvas Viewer support this?

 Thanks for responding. I tried your search and only found two topics neither of which very useful.

But your reference to the Developers Guide and mention of Automation allowed me to find what I think you intended to guide me to.

I will run some tests to see how well the http SOAP automation works from a browser.

My concerns with this approach over a browser MIME file passing one is that this implies a number of things existing on the machine that are a little heavy I'm not  sure I'm comfortable with every workstation providing web services. I'm going to assume this service is not globally available and is only accessible from the machines loop back interface. If that is not the case I could never deploy this for security reasons.

Having a very light DICOM viewer sort of like a PDF Viewer that opens quickly and can be passed a file that contains instructions on where to load/grab desired DICOM images would be much more ideal.

I can understand the need for Heavy DICOM Workstations also for many reasons but that isn't the specific problem I'm looking to resolve with this.

But still going to give this a try and see how responsive it all is.

Well I gave the automation a try and this is what I found:

1) Browsers today do not allow http requests in javascript to cross domains. The automation I require from a browser to this service would always be a cross domain request. (I could support a proxy to mask all the requests so they do not appear to be cross domain to the browser but this seems like yet even more ugly overhead to support something that could be relatively simple)

2) As documented in the automation pages currently no support is available for loading images through WADO/DICOM. The automation only supports images already available in the local store.

Unfortunately the functionality available for this product through automation can not actually achieve what my requirements are.

Not sure how user contributed enhancements are supported but rather than all this I'm more inclined to take a look at the source code and see if I could quickly add support for opening and processing a file as outlined in my original request.