Dcm-Ar: A fast Flash-based Web-PACS viewer for displaying large DICOM images

Using Web-PACS has become an attractive option that brings access to medical imaging databases from remote hosts. However, the big size of the medical images to be transmitted impacts negatively on the teleradiologist experience by increasing the dead times elapsed between study request and visualization on the screen. In this context, it is of the upmost interest to implement strategies to optimize image transmission. In this work a system (Dcm-Ar) for remote visualization of DICOM files is presented, which strongly reduces the time-to-display (TTD), thus improving the teleradiologist comfort. Dcm-Ar is made up of a Server interacting with a PACS and a remote Client. The Client is a DICOM viewer, which is based on the Adobe® Flash™ virtual machine. This fact ensures easy and costless dissemination of the technology.