[3] In 1997, his development of IRC earned Oikarinen a Dvorak Award for Personal Achievement—Outstanding Global Interactive Personal Communications System;[4] in 2005, the Millennium Technology Prize Foundation, a Finnish public-private partnership, honored him with one of three Special Recognition Awards.
[5] He started working for medical image processing in 1990 in Oulu University Hospital, developing research software for a neurosurgical workstation,[6] and between 1993 and 1996 he worked for Elekta in Stockholm, Sweden and Grenoble, France putting the research into commercial products marketed by Elekta.
In 1997 he returned to Oulu University Hospital to finish his PhD as Joint Assistant Professor / Research Engineer, receiving the PhD from the University of Oulu in 1999,[3] in areas of computer graphics and medical imaging.
During these years he focused on telemedicine, volume rendering, signal processing and computed axial tomography.
[3] He is also partner and chief software architect at an electronic games developer called Numeric Garden (Espoo, Finland).