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The following is a list of freeware software packages and applications for use in the health industry:
A picture archiving and communication system (PACS) is a medical imaging technology which provides economical storage and convenient access to images from multiple modalities. Electronic images and reports are transmitted digitally via PACS; this eliminates the need to manually file, retrieve, or transport film jackets, the folders used to store and protect X-ray film. The universal format for PACS image storage and transfer is DICOM. Non-image data, such as scanned documents, may be incorporated using consumer industry standard formats like PDF, once encapsulated in DICOM. A PACS consists of four major components: The imaging modalities such as X-ray plain film (PF), computed tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), a secured network for the transmission of patient information, workstations for interpreting and reviewing images, and archives for the storage and retrieval of images and reports. Combined with available and emerging web technology, PACS has the ability to deliver timely and efficient access to images, interpretations, and related data. PACS reduces the physical and time barriers associated with traditional film-based image retrieval, distribution, and display.
Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) is a technical standard for the digital storage and transmission of medical images and related information. It includes a file format definition, which specifies the structure of a DICOM file, as well as a network communication protocol that uses TCP/IP to communicate between systems. The primary purpose of the standard is to facilitate communication between the software and hardware entities involved in medical imaging, especially those that are created by different manufacturers. Entities that utilize DICOM files include components of picture archiving and communication systems (PACS), such as imaging machines (modalities), radiological information systems (RIS), scanners, printers, computing servers, and networking hardware.
OsiriX is an image processing application for the Apple MacOS operating system dedicated to DICOM images produced by equipment. OsiriX is complementary to existing viewers, in particular to nuclear medicine viewers. It can also read many other file formats: TIFF, JPEG, PDF, AVI, MPEG and QuickTime. It is fully compliant with the DICOM standard for image communication and image file formats. OsiriX is able to receive images transferred by DICOM communication protocol from any PACS or medical imaging modality.
The Visualization Toolkit (VTK) is a free software system for 3D computer graphics, image processing and scientific visualization.
ImageJ is a Java-based image processing program developed at the National Institutes of Health and the Laboratory for Optical and Computational Instrumentation. Its first version, ImageJ 1.x, is developed in the public domain, while ImageJ2 and the related projects SciJava, ImgLib2, and SCIFIO are licensed with a permissive BSD-2 license. ImageJ was designed with an open architecture that provides extensibility via Java plugins and recordable macros. Custom acquisition, analysis and processing plugins can be developed using ImageJ's built-in editor and a Java compiler. User-written plugins make it possible to solve many image processing and analysis problems, from three-dimensional live-cell imaging to radiological image processing, multiple imaging system data comparisons to automated hematology systems. ImageJ's plugin architecture and built-in development environment has made it a popular platform for teaching image processing.
Materialise Mimics is an image processing software for 3D design and modeling, developed by Materialise NV, a Belgian company specialized in additive manufacturing software and technology for medical, dental and additive manufacturing industries. Materialise Mimics is used to create 3D surface models from stacks of 2D image data. These 3D models can then be used for a variety of engineering applications. Mimics is an acronym for Materialise Interactive Medical Image Control System. It is developed in an ISO environment with CE and FDA 510k premarket clearance. Materialise Mimics is commercially available as part of the Materialise Mimics Innovation Suite, which also contains Materialise3-matic, a design and meshing software for anatomical data. The current version is 24.0(released in 2021), and it supports Windows 10, Windows 7, Vista and XP in x64.
VistA Imaging is an FDA-listed Image Management system used in the Department of Veterans Affairs healthcare facilities nationwide. It is one of the most widely used image management systems in routine healthcare use, and is used to manage many different varieties of images associated with a patient's medical record. The system was started as a research project by Ruth Dayhoff in 1986 and was formally launched in 1991.
PhotoPerfect is a proprietary commercial photo editing software program for Microsoft Windows, published by Arcadia Software AG. The first version was introduced in 2002.
MicroDicom is a free DICOM viewer and editor for Windows. It can open DICOM images produced by medical equipment. It can also possible to open other image formats - BMP, GIF, JPEG, PNG, TIFF, etc. It has also been used by the U.S. Department of Veterans' Affairs to get medical data on their state of health.
GIMIAS is a workflow-oriented environment focused on biomedical image computing and simulation. The open-source framework is extensible through plug-ins and is focused on building research and clinical software prototypes. Gimias has been used to develop clinical prototypes in the fields of cardiac imaging and simulation, angiography imaging and simulation, and neurology
MeVisLab is a cross-platform application framework for medical image processing and scientific visualization. It includes advanced algorithms for image registration, segmentation, and quantitative morphological and functional image analysis. An IDE for graphical programming and rapid user interface prototyping is available.
AmbiVU 3D is a commercial medical imaging workstation that is compliant with the DICOM imaging and communications format. It is designed for high speed volume rendering of MRI, CT, PET, PET-CT and dual PET-CT datasets.
Orthanc is a standalone DICOM server. It is designed to improve the DICOM flows in hospitals and to support research about the automated analysis of medical images. Orthanc lets its users focus on the content of the DICOM files, hiding the complexity of the DICOM format and of the DICOM protocol. It is licensed under the GPLv3.
A Vendor Neutral Archive (VNA) is a medical imaging technology in which images and documents are stored (archived) in a standard format with a standard interface, such that they can be accessed in a vendor-neutral manner by other systems.
Ginkgo CADx is an abandoned multi platform DICOM viewer (*.dcm) and dicomizer. Ginkgo CADx is licensed under LGPL license, being an open source project with an open core approach. The goal of Ginkgo CADx project was to develop an open source professional DICOM workstation.
Vaa3D is an Open Source visualization and analysis software suite created mainly by Hanchuan Peng and his team at Janelia Research Campus, HHMI and Allen Institute for Brain Science. The software performs 3D, 4D and 5D rendering and analysis of very large image data sets, especially those generated using various modern microscopy methods, and associated 3D surface objects. This software has been used in several large neuroscience initiatives and a number of applications in other domains. In a recent Nature Methods review article, it has been viewed as one of the leading open-source software suites in the related research fields. In addition, research using this software was awarded the 2012 Cozzarelli Prize from the National Academy of Sciences.
Studierfenster or StudierFenster (SF) is a free, non-commercial open science client/server-based medical imaging processing online framework. It offers capabilities, like viewing medical data (computed tomography (CT), magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), etc.) in two- and three-dimensional space directly in the standard web browsers, like Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Safari, and Microsoft Edge. Other functionalities are the calculation of medical metrics (dice score and Hausdorff distance), manual slice-by-slice outlining of structures in medical images (segmentation), manual placing of (anatomical) landmarks in medical image data, viewing medical data in virtual reality, a facial reconstruction and registration of medical data for augmented reality, one click showcases for COVID-19 and veterinary scans, and a Radiomics module.