10 Best Free Open source PACS Clients and DICOM Workstations for Windows, Mac OSX and Linux
PACS stands for Picture Archiving and Communication System, a medical imaging technology which provides economical storage and convenient access to images from multiple modalities.
DICOM (Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine) is a standard for handling, storing, printing, and transmitting information in medical imaging. It includes a file format definition and a network communications protocol.
DICOM Workstation works as an option for most medical imaging equipment. It enables healthcare professionals to efficiently display and analyze digital medical images. It can receive digital images from PACS server or virtually any imaging modality including x-rays, MRIs, CTs, and more. It allows remote diagnostic and intensive interpretation of acquired images.
Best Free PACS Clients & DICOM Workstations:
1- Weasis
Weasis is a powerful standalone and web-based DICOM viewer. It was built to manage DICOM workstations for hospitals. It utilizes OpenCV library which is a powerful CV (Computer Vision) programming library, and uses it to render and process the medical images.
Weasis supports PACS servers. It has a user-friendly and highly customizable interface. It supports multiple languages, themes and multitouch features.
Weasis is released as an open source under Eclipse Public License (EPL).
Highlights:
- User-friendly and highly customizable interface
- Multitouch features
- Support for PACS servers
Platform: Windows, Mac and Linux.
2- 3D Slicer
3D Slicer, a free and open-source platform for analyzing and understanding medical image data. Built over two decades through support from the National Institutes of Health and a worldwide developer community. Slicer brings free, powerful cross-platform processing tools to physicians, researchers, and the public.
Slicer is built and tested on many hardware and software platforms. 3D Slicer runs on modern Windows, Mac OS X (10.7 and up), and a variety of Linux distributions.
Highlights:
- Bidirectional interface for devices
- Extensible, with powerful plug-in capabilities for adding algorithms and applications
- Manual segmentation of volumes
- Support for multi-modality imaging including, MRI, CT, US, nuclear medicine, and microscopy
- Interactive visualization of 3D image data
- Python Scripting
Platform: Windows, Mac and Linux.
3- Horos
Horos is a DICOM viewer for Mac OS X. It was released as an open source under GPL 3.0 license. It is a feature-rich DICOM viewer built for professional use. It was built on top of Osirix. We have published a snap review about Horos in here.
Highlights:
- Simple install, and zero configuration
- Plugins manager
- Effortless and simple Preferences/Settings Manager
- DICOM Query
Platform: macOS
Top 11 Free & Open source DICOM Viewers for Mac OSX
4- Navegatium
Navegatium is a free DICOM Viewer for Windows 8.1 and Windows 10. It supports Touch Screens and can be installed directly from Windows Store.
It can visualize, analyze and manage DICOM files. It can access image files from removable media, a local drive or a PACS server. It also has integration with PACS (Picture Archiving and Communication System) for hospitals, clinics and research centers, allowing doctors, radiologists, pathologists and researchers consult and store their studies and medical imaging in their work institutions.
We have written a snap review listing all the features of Navegatium, you can read about it in here.
Highlights:
- DICOM / PACS-ready
- 3D Printing on demand
- 3D Volume rendering
- Reports generation
- Navegatium Knowledge Base: Huge library of DICOM images
- Support for Touch-screens
Platform: Windows 8.1 or Windows 10.
20 Free & open source DICOM viewers for Windows
5- Aliza
Aliza is a DICOM viewer that supports multiple modalities and formats. It has been released for Windows and Linux (Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, and Redhat). Aliza is in active development, and it is getting often upgraded by an active team of developers. Aliza supports 3D and 2D format.
Highlights:
- DICOM Structured Report browser
- DICOM Dictionary (Data Elements and UIDs)
- Directory scanner
- Siemens Mosaic format
- Kretztechnik (Kretz) volume format (partial support)
Platform: Windows and Linux.
6- Miele-LXIV
Miele-LXIV is a Mac OS X native DICOM workstation and viewer. It's completely free/libre software as it is released under GPL3.0 license. Miele-LXIV is developed and maintained by group of developers who are providing regular upgrade for it.
Miele-LXIV is available for install from the iTunes app store (macApp) which makes it easy to follow its releases and upgrade to the latest release with one click.
Miele-LXIV has a plugin generator that allow developers to build their plugins quickly using Xcode.
Highlights:
- Intuitive GUI
- 4D Viewer for Cardiac-CT and other temporal series
- Plugins support for external functions
- Plugin generator
- Export any 3D images to QuickTime, TIFF, JPEG
- Built-in SQL compatible database with an unlimited number of files
- Query and Retrieve studies from/to a PACS workstation (C-FIND SCU, C-MOVE SCU, WADO)
- Multithreaded for multiprocessors and multicore processors support
Platform: macOS
Website: URL
Top 11 Free & Open source DICOM Viewers for Mac OSX
7- Ginkgo CADx
Ginkgo CADx is an advanced DICOM viewer and dicomizer (converts PNG, JPEG, BMP, PDF, tiff to DICOM). It has simple user-interface but advanced features designed for radiologists. Ginkgo is in active development, and it has been released as an open source for personal and commercial use under GPL3 license. It offers Windows, Linux and Mac OSX installation packages.
Highlights:
- Dicomization support from JPEG, PNG, GIF and TIFF
- PACS Workstation (C-FIND, C-MOVE, C-STORE...)
- Multiple modalities support (Neurological, Radiological, Dermatological, Ophthalmological, Ultrasound, Endoscopy, ...)
- Automatic retinal analysis diagnostics, Psoriasis automatic diagnostics and Retinal image mosaic composition through custom extensions
Platform: Windows, Mac and Linux.
8- SMILI
SMILI (Simple Medical Imaging Library Interface) is an open-source, light-weight and easy-to-use medical imaging viewer and library for all major operating systems. The main sMILX application features for viewing n-D images, vector images, DICOMs, anonymizing, shape analysis and models/surfaces with easy drag and drop functions. It also features a number of standard processing algorithms for smoothing, threshold, masking etc. images and models, both with graphical user interfaces and/or via the command-line.
Highlights:
- DICOM and DICOM RT support
- n-D Image Visualization
- Animating Surfaces
- Polygonal Contouring
- Shape Modelling
- Python Scripting
Platform: Windows, Mac and Linux.
9- Mango
Mango is a free cross-platform DICOM program that supports multiple unique formats as well as DICOM images. It is available for use as a free software for non-commercial use. It is developer-friendly with nice and easy user-interface. It supports developers to build and extend it with powerful scripting languages as Python and Java. It is highly modular and extensible with plugins and modules.
Highlights:
- Support for Analyze, DICOM, NEMA-DES, MINC, NIFTI and NIFTI2 image formats
- Support for VTK (legacy), GIFTI (.surf.gii) and BrainVisa surface formats
- Partial support for TIFF, Concorde microPET, AFNI (legacy), Stimulate, and CTI ECAT
- Histogram, cross-section, time-series analysis, image and ROI statistics
- Behavioral Analysis, Disease Analysis, Paradigm Analysis, Extract Brain (Separate brain from non-brain tissue) and more functionalities through plugins
- Plugin Manager
- Support for Java Plugin API and Python Script API development
Platform: Windows, Mac and Linux.
10- MicroDICOM
MicroDicom is an application for primary processing and preservation of medical images in DICOM format.
It is equipped with most common tools for manipulation of DICOM images and it has an intuitive user interface. It is free for non-commercial use.
Highlights:
- Intuitive user interface
- Structures Reports, MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 transfer syntaxes, Encapsulated PDF
- DICOM viewer portable version
- Measurements and annotations
Platform: Windows.
Conclusion
There are many free and great DICOM/PACS Programs, but we think that Weasis (Windows, Mac and Linux), 3D Slicer (Windows, Mac and Linux), Horos (Mac) and Navegatium (Windows 8.1 or above) are the best choices due to their features and active development.
Medevel's DICOM and PACS Archive
- Free & open source DICOM viewers for Windows.
- Open-source Free DICOM viewers (Linux, Mac OSX and Windows)
- FREE DICOM Viewers for doctors: Windows, Linux and Mac OSX
