On a related note, there are a couple of good open source projects for reading the standard imaging files (DICOM). DICOM itself is an interesting mishmash of a standard, but is pretty powerful. Images are shuffled around using a PACS (Picture Archiving and Communication System) which lets the scanning machines send their images to a central location at the clinic, the clinic to send images to your radiologist, your radiologist to send them to the hospital, etc etc. Interesting stuff.
http://www.dcm4che.org/
dcm4che is a collection of server based applications for DICOM and PACS. Sort of like OsiriX, but web based. It's Java Tomcat based and reasonably simple to setup.
Shameless self promotion: MedXT (YC W13) is a cloud RIS/PACS with HTML5 viewer. We provide private DICOM endpoints with unlimited storage and archiving.
I use pydicom[1] quite a lot. It is an open source, pure Python module for reading & writing DICOM files. Works very well by essentially transforming the whole DICOM file into a big dictionary.
pydicom is nice but it lacks network functionality: find, send, store and so on. And it cannot decompress jpegs.
Two large open source toolkits are dcmtk[1] and gdcm[2]. Both comes with commandline applications for viewing dicom files and querying pacs servers. gdcm is bundled with itk[3].
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On a related note, there are a couple of good open source projects for reading the standard imaging files (DICOM). DICOM itself is an interesting mishmash of a standard, but is pretty powerful. Images are shuffled around using a PACS (Picture Archiving and Communication System) which lets the scanning machines send their images to a central location at the clinic, the clinic to send images to your radiologist, your radiologist to send them to the hospital, etc etc. Interesting stuff.
http://www.osirix-viewer.com/Downloads.html OsiriX is a DICOM viewer and PACS for Macs and iOS
http://www.dcm4che.org/ dcm4che is a collection of server based applications for DICOM and PACS. Sort of like OsiriX, but web based. It's Java Tomcat based and reasonably simple to setup.
also useful - 3D slicer: http://www.slicer.org/
This is a cross platform viewer that is fairly capable (although very limited in 3D) and has some dicom communication capability.
Shameless self promotion: MedXT (YC W13) is a cloud RIS/PACS with HTML5 viewer. We provide private DICOM endpoints with unlimited storage and archiving.
https://www.medxt.com
We're currently in private beta. If interested, I'd be happy to hook up HN friends. Contact info in profile.
I use pydicom[1] quite a lot. It is an open source, pure Python module for reading & writing DICOM files. Works very well by essentially transforming the whole DICOM file into a big dictionary.
[1]https://code.google.com/p/pydicom/
pydicom is nice but it lacks network functionality: find, send, store and so on. And it cannot decompress jpegs. Two large open source toolkits are dcmtk[1] and gdcm[2]. Both comes with commandline applications for viewing dicom files and querying pacs servers. gdcm is bundled with itk[3].
[1] http://dicom.offis.de/dcmtk.php.en
[2] http://sourceforge.net/projects/gdcm/
[3] http://www.itk.org/