By Roland Piquepaille
Will 'podimaging' become as popular as 'podcasting'? Probably not, but several thousands of doctors are using the free OsiriX software to manage their medical images on their iPods and Macintoshes, according to this article from eWEEK. The radiologists who developed the software chose the Apple platform because of the high performance of the Mac graphics. With OsiriX, you can store and manipulate images on your iPod the same way you handle music files with iTune. And then, you can transfer these images or movies to any other Mac, using iChat to discuss a diagnosis with a colleague. Pretty neat...Here is the introduction of the eWEEK article.
Radiologists [and other medical experts] are turning to iPods to deal with the hassles of managing medical images. They're not listening to music, though; they're looking at pictures.
Medical images are increasingly important in diagnosing everything from cancer to heart disease to sports injuries. And they are used extensively for research, including brain function and experimental treatments, but they also require large data sets, making storing and transferring images problematic.
Two radiologists recently developed open-source software, called OsiriX, to display and manipulate complex medical images on the popular portable devices called iPods. The most current version of OsiriX, which speeds up some processes and fixes crash-causing bugs, was released on Tuesday.
How did they get the idea of using an iPod?
Osman Ratib, vice chairman of radiologic services at UCLA, said the motivation for OsiriX came from problems storing images at work. "I never have enough space on my disk, no matter how big my disk is -- I always need more space," he said. "One day I realized, I have an iPod that has 40GB of storage on it. It's twice as big as my disk on my laptop, and I'm using only 10 percent of it for my music. So why don't I use it as a hard disk for storing medical images?"
In "iPod Helps Radiologists Manage Medical Images," the Radiological Society of North America, Inc. (RSNA) gives other details.
[The other developer, Antoine Rosset, M.D., a radiologist in Geneva, Switzerland, currently at UCLA,] set up the OsiriX software to automatically recognize and search for medical images on the iPod. When it detects the images, they automatically appear on the list of image data available -- similar to the way music files are accessible by the iTune music application.
"It's easy to use and you don't have to worry about how to load and unload it from the iPod," Dr. Ratib says. "But the real beauty of it is that I can use the images directly on the iPod. I don't have to take the time to copy them to my computer. The iPod allows me to copy data from work to my laptop, but I don't have to do it if I don't want to."
Dr. Ratib sees the iPod as a kind of giant memory stick, "The performance is amazing."
On the OsiriX website, you can download the free software distributed under Open Source Licensing.
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And you'll find many pictures and movies on this page. Don't miss this short heart movie (Quicktime) produced with the VolumePRO board. On the left is a "heart image produced with the VolumePRO board, based on a Cardiac-CT." (Credit: OsiriX team) |
It is estimated that there are about 5,000 users worldwide. And the RSNA gives the results of a survey of OsiriX users.
Among the respondents to the survey, more than one quarter of the OsiriX users were radiologists, half of them at university hospitals. Forty-one percent of the total survey respondents said they use OsiriX daily, while 46 percent use it weekly. The most frequent usage was for research (53 percent), followed by presentations (37 percent), PACS at home (34 percent), PACS at work (29 percent), 3D station (26 percent) and fun (24 percent).
For more information, you also can read this Wikibook about the OsiriX Specifications.
Sources: M.L. Baker, eWEEK, January 5, 2005; RSNA News, December 2004; and various websites
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