// the find
ivmartel/dwv
DICOM Web Viewer: open source zero footprint medical image library.
DWV is a pure-browser DICOM viewer library — no server-side rendering, no plugins, just HTML5 canvas and Web Workers. It handles the hard parts of medical imaging: multi-frame CT/MR/PET, MPR, segmentation overlays, and SR annotations. Target audience is developers building clinical or research web tools who need a DICOM rendering engine they can embed without standing up a backend imaging server.
Genuine DICOM parsing in-browser including JPEG 2000, RLE, and JPEG lossless via Web Workers — not just 'load a PNG'. Annotation round-trip works: it writes back to DICOM SR (TID 1500) so annotations aren't trapped in a proprietary format. MPR (multi-planar reconstruction) from raw voxel data is non-trivial and it's there. Active maintenance — pushed yesterday, CI is green, and the API surface is stable enough that there's a formal API extractor config tracking it.
GPL-3.0 is a deal-breaker for anyone building a commercial product; there's no commercial license option mentioned, so you're either open-source or you're not using it. DICOM conformance is incomplete by design — some transfer syntaxes and SOP classes are unsupported, which only bites you when a real scanner produces a file you can't open. The UI layer is thin scaffolding — you get the rendering engine but you're writing your own viewer shell, which is fine but worth knowing upfront. Not certified for diagnostic use, which is stated clearly but means any clinical deployment needs its own certification path on top of this.