Interactive User Interface for Visualizing Digital Medical Images

The development of a Picture Archiving and Communication Systems (PACS) in clinical environment allows physicians and radiologists to assess radiographic images directly through imaging workstations. The development of medical workstations was primarily oriented toward the development of a convenient tool for rapid display of images. There is, however, an increasing need for quantitative analysis of the images and PACS workstations should provide the processing and analysis tools in a convenient and easily accessible way. We developed a software package, called OSIRIS, for the display and manipulation of images from different modalities that can be visualized through the same user interface. The primary goal of OSIRIS is to provide a portable and adaptable platform that can run on different workstations with the same user interface based on windows, menus, icons and buttons. OSIRIS is currently being developed based on X-11 windowing system and OSF/Motif extension. Such a platform is designed to be portable to any computer running Unix and equipped with a graphic display system running X-11. A special version of the software is developed for the Macintosh personal computer. Also, because we develop this software in the object oriented language C++, it is easily expandible and easily adaptable to different needs and requirements. In the design of the OSIRIS program special care was taken to provide a very consistent approach with the different image processing tools. The way the different tasks are performed are always very similar allowing the user to rapidly become familiar with the operation of all the features of the program.