iPod Helps Radiologists Manage Medical Images

Technology coming from the consumer market is changing the way we do things in the radiology department.— Osman Ratib, M.D., PhD

The iPod is not just for music any more. Radiologists from the University of California, Los Angeles, and their colleagues at other institutions from Europe and Australia are now using iPod devices to store medical images.

"This is what we call using off the shelf, consumer market technology," says Osman Ratib, M.D., Ph.D., professor and vice-chairman of radiologic services at UCLA. "Technology coming from the consumer market is changing the way we do things in the radiology department."
Dr. Ratib and Antoine Rosset, M.D., a radiologist in Geneva, Switzerland, recently developed OsiriX, Macintosh-based software for display and manipulation of complex medical image data.
How did the developers go from a music player to a medical storage device? "We basically wanted something that everybody could use," explains Dr. Ratib. "That's why OsiriX can be used with the iPod, iChat and other tools."
"Radiologists deal with a very large amount of medical imaging data," Dr. Ratib explains. "I never have enough space on my disk, no matter how big my disk is—I always need more space. One day I realized, I have an iPod that has 40 gigabytes 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?"

Full article here-

RSNA News - December 2004