ClubPACS Western Michigan - Home

Radiology Art = sweet

2008-06-23T16:01:00Z

Radiology Art is still in its early stages, but a great idea and will be fun to track. Gotta love the banana submitter who reported on the scan… “The bright spot on the banana MRI was confirmed to be at the location of a bruise, and when the banana was peeled it was soft and dark in that location.”

Dicom 2 Database via Mirth

2008-05-28T10:11:00Z

Here is a quick example channel, and demonostration (flash) on how to database dicom tag values.

The story:
- Read a DICOM file in, and move it after its processed.
- Strip the values into variables
- Jam them in a mysql database

Here is the demonstration Screencast

Here is the channel

Here is the ddl for the database

SIIM 2008 PlugFest - Mirth on Stage

2008-05-21T10:58:00Z

We got our Plugfest on! For awhile now I have wanted a “booth” like atmosphere for powerful OSS products… and this year, thanks to Paul Nagy, we got it. I got a chance to show off Mirth who played the integration role in the demonostration. I have to thank Jeff Peters from Webreach for providing the cool swag and everything I needed to represent this outside of his organization. Of course, I need to thank Spectrum Health for letting me have some professional hack time at these venues, and would like to thank SIIM for letting Paul’s brain child come of fruition, I hope it gets a chance next year and a shot a refinement.

With that being said, it was the first Plugfest. I immediately would like to say that the tables should NOT have been in the center of the room, but rather against the walls, or in aisleways, much like a vendor show. We could have been facing folks one at a time instead of trying to “talk in circles” literally. This also would have given the opportunity to set up some A/V and video screencasting distribution a little smoother.

Another point, Mirth was somewhat of a star, and I needed more representation. I think I underestimated that, and next year, Im going to beg Webreach to send somebody out to help. At the ring of the bell, I was instantly swamped and intimidated, but obliged most interested best I could with sample channels, some swag from the webreach camp, and put my MacBook to work by ripping 12 adhoc CD’s with the screencasts, sample channels and webinars.

Participants to the plugfest were cordial to say the least, and some had already deployed some interesting integrations with the product. I would have liked more time, (how about an all day thing Paul?) to see what they have done, but the evil of moderating is participating sometimes becomes a challenge. Can you believe I missed the dcm4chee table altogether and it was right next to me? This is ok however, since I got this cool dcm4che.org hat hat to wear all over the Emerald City, and was also knighted with cool polo shirts from Webreach and dcm4che (PACS Mafia).

Here are the resources from the PlugFest in case we ran out:

Mirth Install on Windows

Mirth Install on Mac OSX

SIIM – PlugFest CD 2008

WebReach Mirth Appliances Handout

Mirth-JavaScript Reference

Mirth-SIIM News Winter 2008

Call Buttons for Radiologists - Optimus 3

2008-05-19T16:35:00Z

Have you ever seen an "Optimus 3 Keyboard?":http://www.artlebedev.com/everything/optimus-mini/. Cool toy, fairly inexpensive, and can be hacked to work in about any environment... even Radiology. The idea here is to give some control outside of the diagnostic workstation, and offer a "press of the button" type service in the event of issue... and it was entirely possible due to the OSS Driver, "OM3 Controller":http://optimus.codecrater.at...

What was I able to do with it?

I was able to manipulate the buttons, change the status, fire on the events when buttons were "pressed" or "pushed" and even able to integrate it with a webservice for some cool interactions and notification ...

In particularly, page a person, launch a 3rd party viewer, and also launch into a web workflow with the touch of a button. Cool eh?

Scripting Osirix with RubyOSA

2008-01-07T11:25:00Z

If you are a Ruby fan and have toyed with AppleScript in anyway to automate your Mac, take a look at RubyOSA a gift from Apple that provides a bridge for Ruby to the Apple Event Manager.

As an example, I created a quick script and screencasted the functionality. Here is the low down on what the script does: It opens OsiriX, grabs the current version, opens OsiriX, retrieves a an image from a remote url, selects the image, opens it, and tops it all off by exiting the application.

Screencast includes some functionality to talk to other applications with input from another (OsiriX 2 IChat).

Much Ado for 8 lines of code eh?

Osirix RubyOSA API

Osirix Ruby OSA Screencast

Example Script

Fun with OsiriX and a wii remote

2007-12-30T11:24:00Z

This is not super amazing. It was however fun, and thanks to this cool little app from Hiroaki I was able to control OsiriX with a wii remote. You can skip through a series, either up or down, zoom, step forward or backward through a stack and stop/browse with the trigger button. Im pretty sure if I would have spent more than an hour hacking it I could have dug for more functionality, (I do know however the nunchuck had no effect). At any rate below is a cheap video to show the functionality.

PDF Cheatsheet

In Action Video!

PDF Extraction and Conversion with Mirth

2007-12-24T10:39:00Z

So here is the story, with a not-so-agile ending, but effective solution. Our EKG system is robust enough to send out various formats of the resulting EKG embedded in an HL7 segment. Depending on your dip switches, this can be TIFF, postscript, and more notably, PDF. This is all good, because the customer wants them into the EMR, which supports multiple ways to do this, however getting the pdf out of the message is the kung fu integration staff may sometimes have to deal with.

Goal: Receive Message from EKG system, and place resulting PDF on a remote filesystem with the name, fin, mrn of the patient as its filename.

This sub-intellectual blathering on the interwebs outlines:
- how I stripped the pdf from the HL7 message
- how I used my own custom java class in Mirth.
- how Mirth and iText saved the day for the second time in the solution.

Mandantory Screencast

Freshly Brewed Java Strip/Encode Class

Convert a PDF Version using Mirth Channel

If you are still hanging in there, here is the process flow:
- EKG system sends out HL7 Message with PDF embedded.
- Mirth, takes the inbound message, grabs 3 variables from the message and passes the UUENCODED (I know, Base64 would have been elegant) segment to a java class for appropriation as a file. Mirth then ftp’s the file to a remote filesystem.

For starters, lets take a look a the Message from Mike Litherland’s HL7 Browser. The Name, FIN, MRN of the patient (and the requirement) are easy and quite frankly are no fun at all. The Good, Bad, and the Ugly exist in the not so popular ZPD segment as in the screenshot below.

If you take a closer look at this segment you will notice that its telling you what kind of file it is PDF (ZPD2.1), some integrity checks on the size of the file in (ZPD3.1, ZPD3.2), and the “meat” of our solutions exists in ZPD3.3. So check it, by looking at it, its UUencoded. This really sucks, but is not a big deal, and gives us the opportunity to flex some of Mirth’s ability to include some custom stuff and also to flex some java foo. Im going to note here that I actually think Mirth can do this nowadays, and I can recall also Brendan Haverlock showing me some Mirth utils in the form of:

importPackage(Packages.com.webreach.mirth.util);
Entities.getInstance().encode("String");
Entities.getInstance().decode("String");

But im NOT using this here, I whooped up a Java Class StripDecode, with two methods Strip/Decode, the first method will escape all the HL7 escape chars from the segment, the second method Decode, Decodes it and write it to a target file name. I uploaded it to the ‘lib\custom’ folder on Mirth and was able to access it in the channel transformer via javascript.

Here is the Java Class.

And below is a screenshot to the javascript that includes the Java Class:

Ok, pretty sweet, we are now writing the extracted pdf’s to the local filesystem on Mirth, we compliment the channel with another channel that reads the files and ftp’s them to a remote server which ends up in the specified target location.

But, HOUSTON WE HAVE A PROBLEM.

After all the hackery, it ends up that the EMR has having issues with our PDF version(1.0) we are writing out. Its not our fault, its the pdf version that is all encoded up in the segment. We need at least a 1.2, so what to do now?

Chris Bonis and I googled it about and ended up at the iText site. Cool, maybe we can include it and do some conversions? Better yet, Mirth had iText already included in the libraries, all we had to do was call it and BAM! We were writing out 1.4’s from our Adobe 1.0’s using the Stamp method. We seriously read it in, and write it out.

Isn’t that just awesome?

Special thanks to Jeff Peters, and Chris Lang at WebReach Inc for the opportunity to hack on some Mirth appliances!

PACS Webview 0.5 - a web based view of dcm4chee

2007-12-23T10:39:00Z

Now this is cool. It is flat out well done, easy to deploy, and utilizes all the lightweight image viewing .js stunts that I had tried to showcase in WADO on RAILS.

I test drove 0.5, I hear 0.6 is around the bend. I don’t think its in the same zip code as Xero, but extremely well done from the folks over at SKS Hospital, India & Raster Images, India.

Download PACS WebView 0.5

More Screenshots from the Developer

Brainsite Quicklook Generator

2007-11-28T10:39:00Z

If you like Albert Gnandt’s Beagle as a Linux user, you will like Brainsite Quicklook Generator as a Mac User. If you use the new quick look functionality in Leopard, you can now utilize it for the dicom scattered all over your file system.

Rogue Research

I went to RSNA 2007 and all I got was this IHE mouse

2007-11-27T10:39:00Z

Welp, RSNA lasted 2.5 days for me… aside for having limited time and $6 dollar bottles of water, here is a rundown of my points of interest:

Max Warnock, a 5th level Triple Store Cleric, gave me an example benefit of the Semantic Web by showing me the inside skinny on an up and coming gem for Rails ( ActiveSesame ?).

Mirth now supports DICOM in version 1.7. Chris Lang and Damien Evans locked horns and the ‘chay DICOM enabled the coolest OSS Order Filler in the business.

XERO looking snappy.

McKesson had a very cool Pixel Touch interface for PACS.

Globus could change everything, and the likeness of the below command is in this blogs near future…

tgcp bigfile.dat sween.host.com:/home/users/sween

Jobs had a presence there, locked and loaded with OsiriX.

Maris is on the top of my hacking list and pre-empted the conference with the release of Open Eye.

OsiriX XML-RPC Test Tool

2007-11-17T10:39:00Z

One thing I was particularly hyped up about in the up and coming OsiriX was the XML-RPC capabilities to remote control the app. This opened the door for all kinds of integration with RIS and Teaching File Systems and hours of fun annoying your buddy while reviewing cases!

At any rate, I have written an application that takes advantage of the XML-RPC functionality in OsiriX 3.0. The Code is written in C#, and I have made the VS Project available below.

Screencast of Tool in Action

Download App and Source

WADO on RAILS, L O S T and rebuilt

2007-10-17T10:39:00Z

Remember This? I lost it. I don’t remember deleting it, I think I just plain couldn’t locate it anywhere… odd, but nonetheless since I had a few folks wanting to take a peak at how it was done, I re-wrote it, and here it is.

Things I added: lightbox2 and suckerfish lightbox... I was messing with the js anyway, and threw it into the rebuild. Pretty cool how lightbox2 groups images now, it allows you to walk through the stack! The suckerfish hack is quite cool too, but not as useful in a viewing type app as it would be in more like a teaching file viewer for key images.

For true Ruby on Railists, the use of find_by_sql would probably get me voted off the island, but for those of you that speak sql at dinner parties (Paul!) you will be right at home.

Its hosted up at Google Code (now)

QUICK, SHOTTY SCREENCAST HERE -2MB

ClubPACS 2.0

2007-10-01T11:18:00Z

If you haven’t bothered to check in at the Mothership, ClubPACS got a long awaited face lift and some added functionality. RSS, tagging, search… Taking the Fear out of Filmless with Drupal.

ClubPACS

IKVM creates C# 'Bizarro' version of LightHL7Lib

2007-07-29T10:39:00Z

Driven by complete laziness, I used IKVM to hook up some C# foo with existing java libraries for HL7. The solution was very easy, but the requirement was Winforms and C# it had to be (for me). It would only have been a matter of converting LineReader2.java to C# to get a pure implementation of Mike Litherlands LightHL7Lib java library, but the project is in the books now, and here is my post regardless.

I didn’t get much into the IntegrateLib over at NULE.ORG (though IKVM brought it over flawlessly), but I did manage to get basic message parsing going with the same coolness as its native JAVA existence. I guess consider the JAVA version from the Hall of Justice and consider the C# version Bizarro from the Legion of Doom.

&t_Here’s how to convert Litherlands (or any other JAVA library to C# for use in your applications)._

Go get IKVM , and unzip it to c:\ikvm\ on your Winders Box.

Go get LightHL7Lib and you might as well get IntegrateLib from NULE.ORG .

Compile Mike’s stuff from within NetBeans to get your pipin’ hot LightHL7Lib.jar and your IntegrateClientLib.jar.

Put both of those .jars in c:\ikbm\bin.

Run this command first for just the HL7Light Client Lib:

First, bask in the glory of your LightHL7Lib.dll for inclusion in your new C# project. Then include that .dll for use with Integrate like below…

Then, include the .dlls you created, plus the IKVM .dlls in your project and you are up and running! Cool eh? ;a href=”http://www.clubpacswestmi.net/HL7Lightcsharp2.png”>

woot!!!

SIIM - Tools of the Trade

2007-06-10T10:39:00Z

By Request, here is the link to the presentation and screencasts I gave at SIIM Section 12 this year… through SIIM.

This presentation outlines the use of Rails, Mirth, JPCAP, mturoute.exe, pstools, and other utilities.

Download @ SIIM