Extending Bahmni Lite to Integrate with PACS and Access DICOM Images

Hello everyone,

I’m currently exploring the capabilities of Bahmni Lite and am interested in extending it to integrate with a PACS system. My main goal is to be able to access and display DICOM images directly within Bahmni Lite. I understand that Bahmni Lite is designed to be a lighter version of the comprehensive Bahmni EMR system, but I am curious if it supports such integrations.

Has anyone here successfully integrated PACS with Bahmni Lite? If so, what challenges did you encounter during the integration process?
Is it possible to directly access and display DICOM data within Bahmni Lite? Are there specific modules or plugins required to achieve this functionality?
What are the best practices for ensuring that the integration adheres to relevant data protection and privacy regulations, especially regarding medical imaging data?

I would appreciate any insights or recommendations from those who have experience with this kind of setup. It would be particularly helpful to hear about any tools or third-party services that facilitate this integration.

Thank you in advance for your help!

You could use Ozone’s IOL for this, as we’re currently developing EMR-RIS/PACS routes with it. Perhaps there could be a space for collaborating on this as this is still work in progress for us at the moment?

We’re currently doing this work with OpenMRS and Orthanc. That wouldn’t prevent you from using Bahmni EMR as we’re currently also adding support for Bahmni EMR to be a possible EMR app within Ozone (thereby entering this list of supported apps within Ozone).

We shall also explore to do this with dcm4chee.

cc @mksrom @sidvaish97

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@gallaun very much so. Remember, Bahmni Lite is just a packaging of components and essentially uses the same base components of Bahmni Standard.

If your main goal is to just view the images and want to use Dcm4chee. (Assuming you don’t want the orders to be sent from EMR)

  1. You can just copy over the dcm4chee config from Bahmni Standard (docker-compose for standard or from the helm chart). Use Dcm4Chee as PACS Server where images would be stored by the modalities.
  2. Subsequently you just need to configure Oviyam2 viewer. Check our WIKI documentation for that.

Alternatively, if you want to use Orthanc as PACS server, you can achieve that too - with little bit of work.

  1. Oviyam2 DICOM viewer should work with Orthanc as well. Atleast it used to. @mohant could you please check whether it still does?
  • Alternatively, you can use OHIF viewer with Orthanc. DCM4Chee2 doesn’t work with DicomWeb Standard which OHIF can seamlessly connect with. Orthanc does.
  1. if you are using OHIF Dicom Viewer, you will need to write a custom display control and integrate with the Bahmni Patient Chart/Dashboard. Or use a small app (simple frontend should suffice, no backend needed if orthanc is already installed). We have some sample codes in other repos - connect us over slack and we can guide you.

If you want to receive orders from EMR and also observations from the PACS Server - you can do that easily enough too.

  1. With DCM4Chee - you have the out of box implementation from EMR
  2. With Orthanc - technically it should work. Bahmni essentially uses Standard HL7v2 ORM (for orders) and ORU (Observations) to integrate with a PACS server. You may have to check the integration and modify things a bit - that shouldnt be difficult. Check this, it just uses standard HL7 messaging. However for Orthanc to receive and process ORM messages, you must have the MWL plugin installed.

Hope the above helps. Connect us over slack if you need further assistance.

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@angshuonline @gallaun Orthanc supports Oviyam viewer as well. What DICOM viewer is compatible with Orthanc? — Orthanc Book documentation.

Adding to Angshu’s reply above, on our Bahmni Standard Docker compose, you will see services tagged with profile as pacs. You can simply copy paste into Bahmni Lite and you should be good to go. Please refer this Wiki page for configurations.

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Thank you for the quick responses. I’m studying Medical Informatics, and we currently have a project where we need to install Bahmni on a server. Consequently, we were wondering whether to go with Bahmni Lite or Standard, and a question arose whether Bahmni Lite also allows for configuration with PACS. Your answers have been very helpful, thank you.

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