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An Imaging Center Website With Online Booking and a DICOM Viewer for Patients
An imaging center website can do more than list services and a phone number. Patients can book a scan online, with the exam deciding which rooms and times are free, and then open their images in a patient portal that has a real DICOM viewer: scroll the slices, change window and level, zoom and measure. The same viewer can open a CD from another hospital in the browser, so the files never leave the patient’s computer. Lumenwell Imaging is a working example of this, built with React, a C# API and PostgreSQL.
Most imaging center websites stop at a list of scans, a phone number and a PDF of instructions. The interesting part, the images, still goes home on a CD that most computers can’t open.
So I built an example of what the site could do instead: Lumenwell Imaging, a fictional outpatient imaging center with online booking and a patient portal that shows the scans.
Booking that knows the rooms
Pick an exam: a CT chest, an MRI knee, an abdominal ultrasound, a chest X-ray. The exam decides which kind of scanner it needs, and the times you see are the times one of those rooms is free. Book an MRI and the slot is taken in MRI room 1; the next person at that time gets room 2, and after that the time is gone.
The form asks whether you already have an order from your doctor or want the center to request it, and has room for what staff should know (implants, claustrophobia, earlier scans elsewhere). The confirmation says what to bring.
The patient portal is a real DICOM viewer
Under Your images is the same viewer as our free DICOM viewer:
- Scroll through the slices of a CT or MRI, or play an ultrasound clip.
- Window and level: drag for contrast and brightness, or pick lung, soft tissue or bone.
- Zoom, pan and measure in millimeters, from the file’s own pixel spacing.
- Every DICOM tag, grouped and searchable.
In the example the portal holds public sample studies. In a real one, it would show the patient’s own scans, next to the radiologist’s report.
A CD from another hospital, without uploading it
Patients often bring scans from somewhere else. In the portal they click Open a folder, pick the CD, and the series opens in the same viewer. The files are read in the browser tab and never sent to a server, and Close and delete clears them from the page.
For the center, that means prior studies can be looked at before the visit without asking anyone to upload medical images to a website.
How it’s built
- React for the site and the viewer, pre-rendered so search engines read every page.
- A C# API with PostgreSQL for bookings and room calendars. In the example, each visitor gets a private sandbox that is deleted after 48 hours.
- The viewer reads DICOM in the browser: uncompressed, deflated, RLE and baseline JPEG, gray or color, single images or clips. The samples were prepared with the open-source OFFIS DICOM Toolkit (DCMTK). The case study has the architecture and the tests against broken and hostile files.
What a real one would add
Sign-in for patients and referring physicians, the reports, a connection to the center’s PACS so new studies appear on their own, and reminders that never include health details. The viewer is a technology demonstration, not a medical device: a real portal shows images to patients, while diagnosis stays on the radiologists’ workstations.
Open the Lumenwell Imaging example →
Running an imaging center or building for one? Tell me what you need.