It is designed to improve the DICOM flows in hospitals and to support research about the automated analysis of medical images.

Orthanc can turn any computer running Windows, Linux or OS X into a DICOM store (in other words, a mini-PACS system).

[6] Orthanc also features a plugin mechanism to add new modules that extends the core capabilities of its REST API.

As of May 2022, a dozen of plugins are available: Orthanc was initiated by Sébastien Jodogne in 2011 as a postdoctoral researcher at CHU de Liège.

Since 2021, the development has been handled both by Alain Mazy with financial support from Open Collective, and by the health informatics research team led by Sébastien Jodogne at Université Catholique de Louvain.