General aspects for choosing the DICOM viewer

Most of physicians choose the PACS by its viewer. DICOM Image viewers, the programs that run in workstations, facilitate accessing to the digital im-ages via a DICOM network. A good workstation should be equipped with professional monitors and other hardware requirements. A wide range of DICOM image viewers are available from simple 2D viewers which offer means of manipulating the im-ages (rotate, zoom, brightness, contrast and others) to 3D or 4D programs with sophisticated features such as multimodality image fusion, vessel segmentation and computer aided diagnostic tools."nThese programs can be categorized to client-based and web-based viewers. Despite the client-based viewers, which are heavy-weighted programs, equipped with strong features, web-based viewers are usually light-weighted with essential imaging features and suitable for TeleRadiology. Accessing to the digital images via the Internet is the main propose behind a web-based viewer. Web-based viewers may be used for remote consulting when a city or region lacks of native specialists."nAn image viewer as a part of PACS should be in conformance with DICOM standard as communication protocol instated of customized networking. This issue allows the viewer to communicate with any DICOM server and operate as an independent module. Structured Report (SR) editor is an essential part of a DICOM viewer. This kind of reporting benefits the archiving system because of small data size in comparison with keeping reports as scanned images or Secondary Capture Images (SC). Also, connection of DICOM viewer to RIS/HIS is important and as our previous experiences in RIS/HIS we connected Payvand DICOM viewer to the RIS/HIS. "nPayvand DICOM viewer has a lot of features and abilities, but for reaching to the high performance image processing by BARCO-EPD collaboration contract, we integrated our DICOM viewer to the VOXAR 3D and now our users have advanced 3D, vessel, cardiac and colon processing, PET CT Fusion and 3D Enterprise solutions.