Free Medical Imaging Visualization Sofware

If you ever worked with medical images, you know there is a confusion of data formats and programs to visualize images. It is true that the DICOM standard helped a little bit, but only a little bit. Interfile, Analyze, NIFTI are other image formats widely used. And probably, you don't want to spend money on programs to visualize medical images. Manufacturers have the possibility to burn a CD with your images and those CD's bring a visualization software to work with. Most health providers will give you a CD to take to your doctor.

Siemens offers the program Syngo fastView free download. This program helps you to visualize images and it is a very basic version of the hospital workstations. The good thing is that you can open DICOM images from other manufacturers such as Philips and GE (I personally have tried GE images).

If you are an open-source fan and/or have images which are not DICOM, there are several programs. I have experienced several of them and I will tell you about my favorite: AMIDE. 4 main reasons why I like this software: easy to install in any platform Linux, Windows and Macintosh, is able to save jpg for your documents, deals very well with several formats and it is possible to read images which are not any of the standard formats if you know the data details.



 Links:
Philips DICOM viewer
http://clinical.netforum.healthcare.philips.com/us_en/Explore/Clinical-News/MRI/Philips-DICOM-Viewer-download
Understanding and Using DICOM
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC61235/