Comment by solardev | Hacker News Reader

Comment by solardev | Hacker News Reader

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Is it really that big a problem? Yeah the DVD is annoying, but once you get it, DICOM is easily viewable, with free and/or open source softare...

https://github.com/bettar/miele-lxiv

https://horosproject.org/about/

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.luolai.dro...

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/idv-imaios-dicom-viewer/id1444...

> But we still aren't very close to being able to see X-rays on our phones.

Actually, last time I had such an injury, I copied the files from the DVD to my phone and just showed all the doctors exactly that... x-rays and CAT scans on my phone, all using free apps. Similar viewers exist for Mac and Windows too. It works fine and the image format is a lot more powerful than JPEG, letting you scan between depths (or reconstruct a 3D model from individual slices), etc.

It is a big problem. It's unrealistic to expect patients to have access to a DVD ROM drive, let alone the know-how to use any of the software mentioned

yeah thanks to Mr Cook for example, if you're on a Mac, no dice.

that said, tfa, while encouraging, has no details as to how this all can possibly happen.

I just got an external DVD reader and it worked just fine on my M1 mac

Mr Cook? How many modern consumer Windows laptops have a DVD drive?

yea it was easy for me to figure out as well, but I am not the average person. My parent or sibling wouldnt be able to have done it.

Learning to accurately read more than "clean break through an arm" typically takes about 15 years (6 years of medical school, 6 years of radiology school, and fresh graduate radiologists are neither quick nor particularly accurate compared to those who have been working for 3 years).

Software is the least of your problems.

The DVD drive, yeah, that's annoying, but the portable ones exist. And the DVD has its own (Windows only) self-installing viewer thing.

Web viewers exist too: https://ivmartel.github.io/dwv/

Not to say it's great UX, but it's really not that hard to solve compared to the rest of the mess of the medical industry.

It's a bureaucratic nightmare thing, not a software challenge.

I honestly don't understand why it's unrealistic to require a DVD drive when one can often buy a USB unit for less than the price of a decent dinner.

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