The iPod enters the ER
Lots of doctors use the iPod. So what? Lots of dentists do, too. No, the thing is that doctors are using the iPod in their work. Managing medical images is what they're doing with the portable music player. Such images are vital in diagnosing everything from heart disease to cancer and are critical for research, but they're big and storing them is a pain. Enter the iPod. "I never have enough space on my disk, no matter how big my disk is — I always need more space," said Osman Ratib, vice chairman of radiologic services at UCLA. "One day I realized, I have an iPod that has 40GB 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?"
All he needed was a program that would store and manipulate the images on the iPod in the way that iTunes handles music files so Ratib sat down with Antoine Rossett, a Swiss radiologist, and together they wrote the open-source software OsiriX. Now it's news.
The Radiological Society of North America has just published "iPod Helps Radiologists Manage Medical Images" and eWEEK has picked up on the story. Now, who was it that said the iPod is just a toy? What next? The iPod in the cow byre? In the cockpit? In the classroom (been there!)? In the White House (done that!)? On the moon?
