Incredible App to Read Medical XRays
I know I shouldn't be surprised to see technology enter the medical profession, but with a sister that's a doctor, and her husband, and three roommates from college that are dentists, and after working with optometrists and doctors with their office automation, I have to say that I was honestly surprised to see that our local hospital, Edwards in Naperville, doesn't have xrays on film anymore. Well... maybe they do, but when you go to get a copy of them, you don't get films, you get a CD. "Hey!" I thought... "technology!".
Then I tried to read them on my Mac only to find out that they are a special file format: DICOM - Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine. This format is not universally understood by apps like GraphicConverter or the like, but I was able to find that ImageJ could read the uncompressed DICOM files - which is nice because my wife's hand xrays came as uncompressed DICOM, but when I tried to load my son's rib xrays it said that it wasn't able to read compressed DICOM files. Crud.
I did a lot more googling and then came across OsiriX. What an amazing piece of open source software. This even has awards from Apple for it's excellent design - and tutorials on the Apple web site about how to use it. This is better than many large commercial outfits and yet it's totally free.
Let me give you a quick run-down of the application. First, it's Universal, and my guess is that they'll update it to Leopard to get the 64-bit processing on the Intel hardware as I believe it's capable of being 64-bit on G5 hardware. Second, it's got a built-in database that's smart enough to allow you to run it in a 'cache-only' mode (more on this later), but also capable of loading up xray series off CDs and keeping them on disk for later viewing. Thirdly, it's got automatic update checking, 'metal' theme (soon to change with Leopard), and responds very quickly to all user requests. It's a top notch Mac app.
One of the first things that made me say Wow! was the fact that on the toolbar there's an icon for importing a complete CD of xrays:
I hit that, and whoosh! everything from the CD is available in the app! I was stunned. I've been trying to get these xrays viewable for about 3 months, and all I had to do was to get this one program for my Mac, and click a button and everything is there - all the fields populated with when/where/why, etc. That's an amazing piece of coding!
But it didn't end there... oh no...
The default behavior is to have the application remove the entries from the database as soon as the CD is unmounted. This makes sense if a doctor is using it - there's no need to keep the images around if the disk is out of the drive. But for me, I want to keep the images around so I don't have to have the disk with me to look at the xrays. In order to do this you need to go into the Preferences for OsiriX and go to the 'Database' pane and select Copy files to OsiriX Data folder if: and then select If files are on a CD/DVD. This will mean that all the files will be copied from CDs. But we're not through yet... Next, go to the 'CD/DVD' pane and uncheck the option: Automatically remove images from the database when CD/DVD unmounted. This will then make sure that the images remain in the database once you remove the CD.
With this, I can carry around all the xrays of my family's accidents. I know it may sound a bit grizzly to some, but it's one of those things that makes me feel more connected to them.