Have you been looking for an open-source project to contribute to?

As a software developer, I feel I can have an outsized impact. At a certain point, I felt that impact was wasted on helping a pizza chain increase online sales or a mortgage lender improve margins. With the COVID-19 pandemic in full force, I want to help shine a light on a project that’s near and dear to me.

The OHIF Viewer

The OHIF Viewer is an open-source, web-based, medical imaging viewer. Maintained extensions add support for viewing, annotating, and reporting on images in 2D (slices) and 3D (volumes).

• It is 100% free and open-source.
• It is primarily used for clinical research and trials.
• It is a great option for developing countries (it can run on a Raspberry Pi).
• It has some funding through grants (it won’t disappear tomorrow).

How Can I Help?

It might sound odd, but simply adding to our GitHub repository helps us advocate for additional funding through grants.

Our current grant funds two full-time developers through August. We’re using this time wisely to complete a redesign and core architecture changes that improve the OHIF Viewer’s extensibility while strengthening our out-of-the-box support for oncological imaging research.

React Component Library

We have a component library that follows atomic design principles. We need help creating React components that satisfy our design. Most of them are “dumb” and composed to create example “Views” that demonstrate the different UI states using mocked data and fake interactions. We accomplish this using the docz component library (built on Gatsby). Every contributed component, test, and bit of documentation is incredibly helpful in moving us toward our goal.

Core Architecture Changes

Our first implementation of the OHIF Viewer was a streamlined meteor application that had one purpose. While it was (and is) very useful, we are adapting to support the varied use cases of our community and making it easier to “share” workflows, features, and functionality with others.

Nearly all of this code is vanilla JavaScript and not domain-specific. Developers capable of writing unit tests, discussing implementations, and satisfying a specification are well equipped to assist us here.

Imaging, Segmentation, and 3D Visualization Expertise

This category is less likely to apply to most of you. Any help with the previous items frees up our limited resources to make more progress on these items. If you do have expertise here and wish to contribute, please don’t hesitate to reach out and we can collaborate. In particular, we have a PET-CT Fusion and multi-volume wishlist that requires WebGL/shader experience.

Additional Funding and Resources

While our current grant runs out in August, we have applied for a renewal that would extend funding for two full-time developers for an additional five years. If you are interested in funding OHIF for key features or have development resources you would like to allocate but don’t know how best to do so, please reach out.

Some items detailed in our grant renewal include:

• Simplifying deployment and installation.
• Support for mobile resolutions and an Electron desktop app.
• Expand extension and mode support. A directory of shared “workflows.”
• Much more.

Related Projects

There are many projects in this space. If you are aware of any great projects that are liberally licensed and responsive to contributors, please call them out in the comments and I will try to update this list.

EMR/HIS

Electronic health record and health information systems. These often allow for the management and viewing of patients’ records and are a common integration point for many other systems. For example, you might use an EMR to find a patient’s “imaging study” and to launch a viewing session in the OHIF Viewer.

• Hospital Run: https://hospitalrun.io/

Medical imaging data storage and retrieval

There are more options in this category. Traditionally, these are called PACS (picture archiving and communication system) or image archives. These hold the medical imaging data and expose APIs for retrieving and storing.

How to Reach Out

Create a GitHub issue!

Regular contributors can receive an invite to our collaborators Slack group. We also have regular governance and plan meetings with individuals and organizations capable of dedicating time and resources.