Radiologists adapt iPods for clinical use -- for free

Two physicians develop open-source software enabling doctors to download and store medical images on portable music players.

By Tyler Chin, amednews staff. Feb. 7, 2005.

• PRINT|
• E-MAIL|
• RESPOND|
• REPRINTS|
• SHARE

Since May 2004, hundreds of physicians worldwide have been using software written by two radiologists to store medical images on a device better known for storing and playing music.

AMNews interviewed Osman Ratib, MD, PhD, professor and vice chair of radiologic services at the University of California, Los Angeles, about the unconventional use of iPod, the hot-selling digital music player from Apple Computer, and the OsiriX software program that makes the medical application happen.

The software, which Dr. Antoine Rosset, a radiologist in Switzerland, wrote while on a research fellowship working with Dr. Ratib, is open-source software. It can be downloaded and used for free. The source code is available to any software programmer who wants to use it to develop additional applications.

Question: How did you come up with the idea to use the iPod?

Answer: For some reason the iPod became the thing that everybody talks about. The iPod is only a small feature of a pretty large open-source medical imaging software project. The idea is to provide or to develop an open platform, open-source software free in an academic way for the medical community to be able to manipulate and visualize 3D, 4D and complicated images. ... A [CT] scan that is done for a 3D-rendering of the heart, for example, is over 1,000 images, and they take space. It's in gigabytes. They don't fit in a CD and DVD. So I started using my iPod at work just because at first I didn't have enough capacity on my disks and laptop [for the images].