ClearCanvas ClearCanvas Stories!

How are you using ClearCanvas?

norman — Sat, 21 Feb 2009 04:37:54 GMT

Hi all,

How are you using ClearCanvas products? We want to hear from you in your own words! Tell us your story about how ClearCanvas has made a difference where you are. Some things you might consider sharing with the community:

What kind of organization are you? (e.g. clinic, hospital, company, etc.)
Which CC products do you use?
What is the size and nature of your deployment? (e.g., "We run a single instance of CC ImageServer with a 4TB NAS and 10 CC Workstation clients.")
What do you use CC for? (e.g., "We're a sports clinic and we use CCW to read 50 MRIs of the knee everyday.")
What plugins, if any, have you written to make CC fit your particular needs?
If you're a company that's been able to generate revenue based on our products (yes, that's allowed and encouraged :) ), what's your business model?

Tell us as much or as little as you like. Just post a new topic in this forum to tell your story. Looking forward to hearing from you all!

Site Visit

Fattony — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 12:51:13 GMT

Hi All,

we are currently considering Clearcanvas RIS and Pacs as an option , however we would like to see/evaluate the product at a live site (Europe f possible ) if any members do have a live site which they feel would afford us an opportunity to see the product in a clinical environment can you please post ?

Best Regards

Yet another success story from Turkey

sezerpal — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 14:19:31 GMT

Dear ClearCanvas (here after CC) Community,

We as internet generation experiencing new era. It's exciting global Open-Source paradigm. Not just in software (see http://www.ted.com/talks/cameron_sinclair_on_open_source_architecture.html, I urge founders of CC to be in TED, because they are changing the world)

Our first installation was in January 2009. CC Server and Workstation used in project, a private hospital in Batman City, Turkey (under developed region of country). Average 1000 out patients, 270 radiology studies per day.

We have used CC Server 1.3, 64 bit version, unmodified but fine tuned, hostsmore than 46000 studies to the date. We have modified CC WS 1.3 with CC SDK to integrate with Hospital Information System (HIS). Explorer screen is hidden now, program runs in background as a tray icon, studies can be recalled from HIS patient records screen with one click. HIS launches viewer thanks to automation capabilities using patient ID and accession number. With some minor modifications almost all requests of the customer realised and their satisfaction very high now thanks to streaming technology and other state of the art features. More than 20 workstations works smooth and fast, streaming was a key feature of implementation.

Connected modality types are "CR, CT, MR, XA, RF". All of these get MWL from RIS module of HIS system.

We have rebranded thanks to New BSD licensing policy as our product. We also giving OEM development support few more brands.

Server is IBM x3650 (16 GB RAM, two QC processors) and FC Storage is 3 TB DS3400 with 28 disks.

Project implemented almost in a month. Half was hardware and software installation, other half integration, client design and tesst before live. After this experience we can do future projects much more quicker. Simple design of viewer allowed great acceptance in phisicians with little or no training. Hospital works %90 filmless now, ROI targets reached quickly.

Another project was in major public teaching hospital in Istanbul. We have just given tech. support because Radiology chief of this hospital (also member of this community) is very good in computer issues. There are more than 30000 studies as teaching repository, most of them are more than 2000 images per study.

Our next two installations will be Mini PACS solutions of our OEM brands using CC WS 1.3. We have added multi patient CD burn functionality including DICOMDIR and Autorun enabled DICOM viewer of select to CD.

We also use CC SDK to develop a DICOM GATEWAY for EPSON PP-100 CDROBOT. It's an embedded solution with dedicated touchscreen panel PC. It's an alternative and economical solution to much more expensive systems and real film budget cutter for hospitals.

With ClearCanvas initiative, now we have own our brands, producsts and solutions. Otherwise I would be just a sales person of local distributor of competitor.

We are looking ways to engage development colloboration as soon as possible. We appreciate architects and architecture of the project that changes the world.

Thanks and best regards

Sezer Pal, Istanbul

European Users

Penta Sistemi — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 01:33:40 GMT

Hello,

is there anyone using Workstation and/or ImageServer in Europe and has marked CE software ?

Thank You very much

twain digitizers

smercado — Sun, 30 May 2010 06:20:49 GMT

I have a Vidar digitizer (twain) with which I capture films. At present using Kpacs, Which Clear Canvase product can I do this with?

ClearCanvas in Miami Florida

nico_jones — Wed, 29 Apr 2009 16:51:56 GMT

Hello everyone, I have tried to write this a couple of times already, a power outage killed the first attempt, the second attempt was aborted by an ID 10 T user error =o]. so im going to try again, i feel i owe it to the Clear Canvas guys to let everyone know what a great job they have done with Clear Canvas...

Several months ago i was on the hunt to find a long term PACS storage solution for CT Studies, i look at the major players packages ranging anywhere from 50k to 15k, and most of the less expensive and the GNU (freeware) packages and installed most of them to test and see how they worked after several months of late nights and several OS installs i came across Clear Canvas and was completely surprised and never looked back at any of the others.... FYI: the CEO was considering the use of an offsite DICOM archive service that would have cost 8k to 12k per year at a per study cost.

After trying out Clear Canvas before making my final decision on a product i was going to have to deal with for the next ten years, i wanted to have some assurance my pick was going to work for me and the company i work for, i asked the Clear Canvas guys about support and how serious they were about the future of Clear Canvas, i felt they gave satisfactory response to my questions, so the next step was to show Clear Canvas to the CEO of the company and get his response and the go ahead to purchase the hardware of my specifications.

He asked me how i felt about the product my response was ive tried at least 8 different products and i feel this is the best designed PACS / DICOM storage software ive tried you cant beat the cost and i cant wait to install the RIS in a few months.

Here's the configuration:

Siemens Somatom Emotion 16 CT Scanner ( 1 Gigabit Network ) 5-10 sec transfer of studies to CC. : ) Onsite Rack Mounted: 4TB RAID 6 OS: Server 2003 1Gigabit Network ( Main PACS Archive) Offsite Backup Tower @ Radiologists: 4TB Raid5 OS: Server 2003 ( Offsite Backup ) Hardware VPN: Studies Auto Routed to Backup Server where studies are read using CC workstation.

I needed remote viewing of images, we have several offices, so i have to give some recognition to a simple Web based PACS that's free as well MFP ( My Free PACS ) on the main server using SSL and passwords, I move the studies as needed and delete when they are a week old, MFP also uses SQL Express 2005.

its been a few months since the Scanner was installed and functioning so far so good I have NOT had a single problem with Clear Canvas PACS, Great Job GUYS!!!

If you need a PACS solution and you try it im sure you'll feel the same, I wanted to also Mention just in case this sound to much like a sales pitch, i have no affiliation with Clear Canvas, plus don't forget its free!!!

I highly recommend Clear Canvas to anyone needing a DICOM / PACS solution.

P.S. BTW: I recently ( today ) installed Clear Canvas for another Imaging Center where a friend of mine works he needed help with the configuration and setup they are going to be using it as a backup archive server.

robert

ClearCanvas in Arkansas

jasonreeves05 — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 06:15:01 GMT

I work for a local radiologist in Little Rock, Arkansas who reads from clinics around the United States. He was using a Static Ip service to enable him "Roadwarrior" status. The clinics were having to call, or email, and make sure he was online before they could send images; this became a major issue for the clinics and the Radiologist.

Since I found and implemented ClearCanvas Image Server, He no longer has to be online to recieve images from the clinics; they are routed to me 24/7 and he accesses my server whenever he wants to read. My next step is to get him off of eFilm and onto the ClearCanvas reader.

I am going to extend my knowledge of ClearCanvas Image Server to the clinics and get them moved off of their expensive PACS servers.

ClearCanvas installed and works like a charm.

-Jason Reeves

ClearCanvas at Turkey

SnefeRu — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 04:03:43 GMT

We are working since 2006 on PACS.

Archiving on a Linux or Windows DCM4CHEE use. Radiology professionals to reach the view with the CCW.

Some hospitals had 4 CR, 2 CT, 1 MR data is collected in a single archive. Daily 1200-1500 shots made up. Generally, use the 2TB RAID5 disk structure. In this system, using 4 or more doctors on CCW in a way to run fast and healthy.

In Turkey, we are experienced in PACS think and will actually tell you the story I have dozens.

However, because of my English is not good and I can not write very detailed.

Thank you CC Team!

ClearCanvas at St. Michael's Hospital, Toronto

mkepa — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 05:32:30 GMT

ClearCanvas Workstation was first deployed at St. Michael's Hospital in April 2008 to address a need brought forth by the mammography division. The dilemma was to provide mammography technologists with easy access to review prior mammography images without using the hospital's webpacs. The option of purchasing 5 vendor review workstations was not available due to budgetary constraints. What was needed was a simple, powerful, easy to use DICOM image viewer that could be deployed on standard hospital PCs and work with the existing PACS architecture. Enter ClearCanvas Workstation!! ClearCanvas 1.0 was packaged by the ICT department into a Novell Application Object Template (AOT) which allowed the software to be remotely deployed and configured on any domain PC in the organization with ease. The initial deployment of 5 ClearCanvas workstations in mammography was an instant success and users easily learned how to use the program and quickly integrated it into their workflow. Since April 2008, ClearCanvas workstation has been deployed in the ER department for nurse practitioners assessing patients as well as the Division of Urology, where ClearCanvas workstation has been deployed in consult rooms, research offices, physician offices and urological surgical suites. To date, St. Michael's Hospital has 28 ClearCanvas Workstations deployed throughout the enterprise and users are very satisfied with the quality and ease of use of the product.

ClearCanvas Server has also addressed a very important issue at St. Michael's Hospital. The CT division had been looking for ways to keep a couple months cache of all CT axial data being generated on 3 CT scanners as a failsafe. Normally, modalities have a fixed HD that purges cases every couple of days. The vendor solution was to purchase a larger HD at a premium cost or use MOD disks, which would add significant time and workload pressures onto technologists already working in a busy clinical setting. To avoid high costs and workflow inefficiencies, the solution presented was to deploy ClearCanvas Server on a standard inexpensive server running SQL Express with a decent amount of HD space (1.5TB) and have the CT scanners configured to automatically send axial datasets in the background without technologist intervention. Since December 2008, over 4,500 CT studies have been stored on the ClearCanvas Server without incident and, on more than one occasion, data has been retrieved from ClearCanvas Server back to PACS after studies originally sent to PACS had become corrupted. In this case, ClearCanvas Server has provided inexpensive and powerful backup capabilities to maintain patient data redundancy.

Overall, the ClearCanvas team has put together an amazing suite of software and I look forward to the continued development of powerful, quality products from ClearCanvas.

Best Regards,

Martin Kepa

PACS Administrator

St. Michael's Hospital, Toronto