Radical Imaging's Beginnings

Radical Imaging was founded by its CEO, Rob Lewis, as an independent consultancy in 2010. In the early days, Mr. Lewis was developing custom imaging tools and workflows for his clients using the open-source ClearCanvas .NET framework. Radical Imaging grew by word of mouth into a boutique consulting shop focused on delivering custom solutions for medical imaging problems.

While ClearCanvas initially provided an excellent basis from which to deliver custom solutions, advances in web technology and adoption drove demand for web-based solutions, setting the stage for a new direction.

Radical Imaging's History of Working on OHIF

The idea for Open Health Imaging Foundation (OHIF) was born out of a need for easily deployable solutions; i.e. essentially, the need to overcome the limitations of desktop solutions. At the time, there were no good options for web-based DICOM interpretation and manipulation. The options available were either not open-source or weren’t designed for extensibility; both prerequisites for innovative solutions and delivery of custom solutions.

Around this time, Chris Hafey created the excellent Cornerstone suite of open-source javascript libraries that still stand today among the most popular and useful medical imaging libraries for the web. We began experimenting with Cornerstone and looking at ways to streamline its use for routine medical imaging workflows like those often found in radiology and oncology.

After this period of experimentation, the OHIF project started in earnest with a 5-year grant from the National Cancer Institute (NCI) led by principal investigator Gordon Harris at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH). Over the next five years, Dr. Harris’ group at MGH ran the OHIF development project, providing the feature requirements, visual design, project management and testing, while Radical Imaging provided software architecture and development. Since the grant ended in 2020, additional funding for OHIF has been provided by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI), MGH, Radical (as in-kind support) and various academic and industry partnerships with MGH and Radical.

Radical Imaging Today

Since 2011, we’ve helped hospitals, startups, medtech companies, and research teams design, build, and support custom medical imaging software from cloud-native viewers to complex AI workflows.

We thrive on solving tough imaging challenges and transforming complex workflows into reliable software. Whether it’s customizing OHIF, integrating AI, or building from the ground up, we deliver high-quality results—on time, on spec, and with integrity.