Well, have you ever gotten your medical images on a CD from you healthcare provider? Have you ever wanted to view the various images on a single viewer (say your old images and the most recent ones)? Your Radiologist can view these images and in fact does exactly this (comparing your old images to your new images). I needed an open source, or freeware tool to view my families images and manage our medical information, and something that seems to be easy was actually quite difficult to find.
First, I should say that I actually work in the field of medical imaging for a software vendor of viewers. However I wanted an open source or free product I could share, and use without coming into license conflict.
Here are the DICOM (Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine) viewers I tried (DICOM is the image standard for medical imagery):
DICOMScope 3.5.1
DicomWorks 1.3.5b
MicroDicom 0.0.1 (possibly has the feature, but kept crashing)
MIView 0.6
Sobox 1.0
Mango 0.9.10
Exhalation-B 1.3
TomoVision 2.0 rev1
EZDicom 1.0 rev24
I wanted to use the DICOM index file included with all my CD’s called the DICOMDIR. This file references the images that belong to a series (multiple images related to a procedure) and to images which belong together in the same exam. Otherwise, you will have to view the images individually (not a nice idea for MRI or CT exams which may contain MANY individual images).
This concept of the DICOMDIR has been around for quite a while, and I was quite surprised that few of the popular DICOM viewers actually supported loading the DICOMDIR.
The ONLY viewer I found that could load a DICOMDIR AND had decent viewing capabilities AND was FREE was the Santesoft Free viewer get it HERE. Now this isn’t software used to diagnose on, but for free software for a non-radiologist, its very mature compared to the above other (some are much more well implemented) titles…
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2 Comments
I work in medical image field and I use MicroDicom and DicomWokrs. MicroDicom can open DICOMDIR files witout problem.
Jim, thanks for that update, I couldn’t get MicroDICOM to install and run without crashing, though I must admit I didn’t spend a lot of time trying to make it work. There seemed to be so many DICOM viewers to try out, it just didn’t make a lot of sense to spend the time on one that was causing me trouble. Very likely its something specific to me or my computer. What is your experience with the tool? Is it stable for you? Also, I know DICOMWorks is very widely used as a free alternative to specific vendors viewers, however I didn’t see the option to open a DICOMDIR there, do you know if it has this ability?