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Comment by c22 | Hacker News Reader

I recently got a CD-rom from a hospital containing X-rays of my leg to share with my doctor. Upon finding a computer with a functioning optical drive I was dismayed to discover that the CD-rom contained not 3 simple images of the bones in my leg, but almost 400 megabytes of impenetrable binary data in over 30 nested directories and an .exe called MedicalImageViewer which I was unable to run on the latest version of Windows in my posession (win7) due to missing visual basic related dlls.

I was eventually able to run the app on a friend's computer, but finding no in-built option to export the images I was forced to take screen grabs to email to my primary care provider.

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Aside from noting the fact that DICOM exists for a reason, I'll also just vouch for that particular piece of software running acceptably under Wine.

There are free DICOM viewers you can use. For example https://weasis.org/en/.

Linux has medical viewers. You can get the Ubuntu Mate 22.04 LTS DVD, install it. Open Synaptic, which is the "advanced graphical package manager", search for "DICOM" in the dialogs and install a good viewer.

Guess what your doctor does to look at your X-rays: The chance is high that he'll just execute the .exe file on the CD-Rom too. I've witnessed that already multiple times and always cringe, because of the obvious security implications. It'd be so straight-forward to compromise a doctors office by handing them over a different CD-Rom with malware instead.

The one I worked for also included a viewer on discs burned for distribution (typic'ly to patients, but could go elsewhere if patient signed the right document), but we used a couple different viewers internally. If we received a disc, that DICOM data was imported using our viewers, never whatever was provided on the disc. Local network traffic was…closely monitored.

Occasionally, a remote doctor (not from our office) would call for help with the viewer we provided on disc. Usually, because some advanced feature they could have used at their office didn't exist in the patient viewer, or worked differently.

Normally, instead of discs, we just transceived images via PACS, or accepted physical films to be scanned into our PACS.

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