During the past several years, the using the Web technology and Web server as a means to access PACS image data are being considered and implemented with different technologies architectures. Here, we presented our design and implementation about developing component-based image display module, and then, gave a method to integrate this image display processing (DP) component into a Web-based image distribution server to enable users using Web browsers to access, view and manipulate PACS images. First, we designed the component software architecture of the image display. Second, we developed a Web-based PACS image distribution server based on component architecture, and integrated the DP components and other three PACS components into the Web architecture. Third, we added the new interface supporting http communication to the DP component by using the WinINet API (application program interface) developed by Microsoft, so that, the DP component can be plug-in to Web browsers to interact with the component-based Web server to display and manipulate DICOM images sent from any PACS archiving server. The performance evaluation on the diagnostic display workstation and the component-based Web server shows that the image distribution and display performance from the Web server to browser clients is similar with that of the image loading and displaying procedure of the diagnostic workstation, as more browser clients accessing to the Web server at same time.
