Some time ago we shared a tutorial on how to deploy the OHIF viewer as a web application for visualizing images that are in the cloud, but not in IDC, or visualizing annotations you are creating for the images in IDC. This helped those working with radiology images, but until recently there was no similar recipe supporting digital pathology use cases.
To change this, together with Igor Octaviano and Andrey Fedorov, we prepared another step-by-step tutorial explaining how to deploy the Slim microscopy viewer in the Google Cloud using Google Firebase.
Those of you who worked with Slim before may wonder - there are already instructions how to deploy Slim using Docker - why do I need anything else? There are several reasons:
- Firebase hosting does not require a virtual machine, and the base tier is free - which means you can get a working instance of Slim running at no cost!
- While Docker may be convenient to use on your own machine to experiment with the viewer, setting up Docker is - unfortunately - not always trivial, and your local instance cannot be shared with others.
- Once your free cloud-based viewer instance is ready, you can use it from any computer without having to install anything, you can share access to that instance with your colleagues, and it does not require any maintenance (the upgrade process is documented!).
Prerequisites for completing this tutorial include:
- Google account
- Google Cloud project
- Enabled billing for your project (you can apply for a project with billing enabled from IDC using this form)
The tutorial is accompanied by a Google Colab notebook that will guide you through the process of deploying your own Slim viewer instance and populating a DICOM store under your own project with DICOM data of your choice.
Please share your feedback about this tutorial, and feel free to add any suggestions for other tutorial material you would like to see!