Radical Imaging's History

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.