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Introduction of CIRCUS RS

CIRCUS DB/CS is powered by CIRCUS RS, a lightweight medical image server and a viewer component, written in TypeScript. You can develop a custom viewer application on top of CIRCUS RS.

CIRCUS RS consists of the server part and the viewer (brower) part. RS Server is basically a small HTTP server that hosts DICOM images in the form of volumes, and RS Client is a framework-agnostic image viewer component that can display volume data obtained from an arbitrary resource, including RS Server.

caution

CIRCUS RS is intended to be used for research purposes, and it comes with absolutely no warranty.

RS Server has the following capabilities:

  • Extensible image repository: Out of the box, the server can host DICOM files stored on a plain filesystem (local disk, NAS, etc). This can be customized by creating a small accessor called a DICOM file repository. You can store your DICOM files in Amazon S3 or directly connect to traditional PACS.
  • Server-side multiplanar reconstruction (MPR)
  • Limited support for compressed images

RS Client is a framework-agnostic image viewer component. In addition to basic displaying functions (paging, zoom, pan, windowing), it has the following key features suitable for researches:

  • Volume-based viewer: Fully supports GPU-accelerated, clieent-side multiplanar reconstruction (MPR) and volume-rendering (VR)
  • Hybrid rendering: MPR can be performed both on server-side and client-side using the same algorithm.
  • Extensible annotations: Supports common ones (point, circle, ruler) and uncommon ones used for research (3D ROI, voxel painting)
  • Extensible image source: Out of the box, the viewer communicates with a CIRCUS RS server to fetch volume data. This can be customized, and it is possible to load local DICOM files or create a completely new volume programmatically.
  • Common morphological operations including erosion, dilatation, etc.

All modern desktop browsers are supported. Currently, mobile browser support is limited. We do not support Internet Explorer.

Limitation​

Currnetly, CIRCUS RS does NOT support the following:

  • Movies (typically from ultrasound)

See the Interactive Demo​

CIRCUS RS has an interactive demo, which is available online here. You can run the demo on your local machine by ***.

$ npm install @utrad-ical/circus-rs-demo
note

The demo is using React, but CIRCUS RS itself does not depend on React (or jQuery, Angular, etc.). The demo uses a small wrapper component around CIRCUS RS's Viewer to use it seemlessly in a React component tree.

Quickstart​

Install Node.JS (>= 12.0) if it has not been installed yet on your system. If you are on Linux, NVM is the easiest.

Start a new Node project and install CIRCUS RS via NPM.

$ mkdir my-first-rs-app
$ cd my-first-rs-app
$ npm init -y
$ npm install @utrad-ical/circus-rs

Optionally, install the following TypeScript-related packages. This is not strictly required, but we highly recommend using TypeScript for better developer experiences.

$ npm install typescript ts-node