Radiologists 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, with the help of open-source software.Radiologists
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.
In a bulletin of the Radiologic Society
of North America, co-developer Osman Ratib, vice chairman of radiologic services
at UCLA, estimated that 3,000 to 5,000 people worldwide are using the software,
which essentially converts the iPod into a sort of plug-and-play portable
storage device for images.
Ratib 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?"
With OsiriX, medical image files can be
sorted and managed much the same way as sound files. The software also allows
radiologists to upload files to the Internet and supports instant messaging and
e-mail attachments.
An attitude adjustment is needed on health IT, claims M.L.
Baker. Click here to read more.
The software processes most images
produced by medical equipment (MRI, CT, PET, PET-CT) as well as confocal
microscopy and can read file formats including TIFF, JPEG, PDF, AVI, MPEG and
Quicktime. It processes and reads images according to DICOM, a set of standards
in medical informatics that deals with digital images.
Users can access files directly on the
iPod, or transfer images from computer to computer, though only with
Macintoshes.
Milton Silva-Craig, president and chief
operating officer for Emageon Inc., which develops clinical analysis and medical
image management software, told eWEEK.com that other image management companies
are also working on ways to enable their applications to run on portable
devices, including Tablet PCs and PDAs.
However, he said, portable devices
still have a long way to go, both in terms of sophistication and resolution,
before being used to make diagnoses. "Many of the devices, although they are
quickly increasing in performance and capacity, were simply not designed for
management of large data sets. The second issue would be resolution. For a quick
snapshot, the resolution may be adequate."
A survey of 2,000 OsiriX users showed
that they had found other ways to use the software, particularly for research
and communication. Among the respondents to the survey, about half were at
university hospitals; just over a quarter were radiologists. Forty-one percent
of the survey respondents said they use OsiriX daily, while 46 percent use it
weekly. The most frequent use was for research (53 percent), followed by
presentations (37 percent).
OsiriX can be downloaded from its
home page.
