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orthanc

orthanc is an R package that provides a programmatic interface to Orthanc DICOM Servers to support medical imaging workflows for the R language. Inspired by the design and usability of the PyOrthanc Python package, orthanc enables R users to interact with Orthanc servers using familiar R paradigms.

The package provides comprehensive and user-friendly access to the Orthanc REST API, designed to align with idiomatic R workflows while preserving the structure and semantics of DICOM resources.

orthanc provides:

  • Comprehensive wrapping of the Orthanc REST API endpoints using httr2

  • Asynchronous client support and parallelization using mirai

  • Encapsulated object-oriented representations of hierarchical DICOM resources using R6

  • High-level utility functions for performing common DICOM operations including querying, filtering, managing, modifying, and exporting DICOM data

Installation

You can install the development version of orthanc from GitHub with:

# install.packages("pak")
pak::pak("mattwarkentin/orthanc")

Basic Usage 

library(orthanc)

client <- Orthanc$new("https://orthanc.uclouvain.be/demo")

instances <- client$get_instances()

instances
#> [[1]]
#> [1] "001a7d82-54008387-7b23ad57-8fb6202a-6d3b305b"
#> 
#> [[2]]
#> [1] "001b6592-37c2fbe4-2c07c724-ce9607e2-2bd210e8"
#> 
#> [[3]]
#> [1] "00330d0f-911e5e8d-1e305bae-e5c53b73-d2a49298"
#> 
#> [[4]]
#> [1] "00402ce7-ac05c687-4d0839bc-cecd4fad-3d1b7eed"
#> 
#> [[5]]
#> [1] "00419319-1d16e8d6-2eb65ed2-0de8313f-3356e31e"
#> 
#>  [ reached 'max' / getOption("max.print") -- omitted 2547 entries ]
#> attr(,"class")
#> [1] "orthanc_response" "list"
instance <- Instance$new(instances[[1]], client)
instance
#> <Instance: 001a7d82-54008387-7b23ad57-8fb6202a-6d3b305b>

instance$main_dicom_tags
#> $AcquisitionNumber
#> [1] "4"
#> 
#> $ImageOrientationPatient
#> [1] "1\\0\\0\\0\\1\\0"
#> 
#> $ImagePositionPatient
#> [1] "-249.51171875\\-458.51171875\\364"
#> 
#> $InstanceCreationDate
#> [1] "20151217"
#> 
#> $InstanceCreationTime
#> [1] "125203.943000"
#> 
#>  [ reached 'max' / getOption("max.print") -- omitted 2 entries ]

Acknowledgements

I gratefully acknowledge the authors and maintainers of Orthanc for developing and maintaining an open-source, standards-compliant DICOM server that has become an essential tool in medical imaging research. I also thank the authors and contributors of PyOrthanc, whose work provided important conceptual and design inspiration for this package.

Code of Conduct

Please note that the orthanc project is released with a Contributor Code of Conduct. By contributing to this project, you agree to abide by its terms.