Store Your MRI on an iPod
From the otherwise annoying Apple startup page that overrides my browser-homepage preference comes a link to this cool article about radiologists using iPods to store and transfer medical images:
The iPod is not just for music any more. Radiologists from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and their colleagues at other institutions from as far away as 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.
"We chose to do it on the Macintosh because of the high performance of Mac graphics," Dr. Ratib says. "The purpose is to be able to quickly and interactively manipulate very large data sets in 3D, 4D and even 5D. It's amazing how much performance we get."
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?"
How about that--entertainment R&D (and a much larger market) supporting medical applications. It's not exactly what any industrial policy guru would have planned.