FutureWire - futurism and emerging technology

Monday, February 07, 2005

iPods as Medical Tools

In a sign that personal media players will have disruptive applications reaching far beyond entertainment, radiologists at UCLA are using photo iPods to manage and share digital images. With the help of an open source software program they wrote, the doctors are able to better manage images at far lower cost.

Normally, radiologists rely on specialized workstations, costing $100,000 each, to view high resolution 3D images. To help cut costs in this area, the radiology team wrote an open source program, OsiriX, that allows them to view the images on Mac desktops. Photo iPods turned out to be a convenient, cost-effective way to store and share the image files, as their storage space is far greater than thumb drives or CD-ROMs.

The images are anonymized to keep the image data private.

Sources: Silicon.com, Emerging Technologies