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Comment by ViktorRay | Hacker News Reader

DVD-R’s are actually still super commonplace in the medical field. They’re the perfect way to provide patients their medical images in a cheap physical format that is readable by all electronic medical systems.

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They are not the perfect way to get medical images. A friend called me last week to borrow my external drive because the MRI place gave him a stupid CD he had no drive for.

For what these places charge they should be giving out USB drives like candy. They are so cheap that Micro Center sells 64gb at the counter for like $3 or something. CD/DVD is not a valid option.

cheap USB drives have bad data retention. they will not be readable 3 years later if left unpowered and without a chance to relocate/rewrite data. DVD-Rs will last 20ish years

Cheap "Chinesium" USB drives can be wildly unreliable, plus they're not write protectable meaning your data could be overwritten or deleted by a shitty app/antivirus, or just get malware transmitted over it.

Optical media has the native feature of being written in immutable sessions so your older data is always preserved instead of overwritten(excluding RW media), and also can be write protected when desired by finalizing the session, plus its long data retention shelf life for archiving purposes compared to cheap flash, all make it a great choice for the uses cases of the medical industry file transfer or personal archival at home.

Kaiser emails you the DICOM medical images along with an app for reading them. Most hospitals offer this so I'd expect medical DVDs to die in another decade. The vast majority of PCs and laptops don't come with optical drives and that's been the case for many years now.

>Kaiser emails you the DICOM medical images along with an app for reading them. Most hospitals offer this

Not in my country. Due to strong data protection regulations most radiology shops don't Email the x-ray files to you. They either send it directly to your GP via the official government mandated channel, or they hand it to you physically in print or disc but never email due to the chance of not arriving to its destination or worse, going to someone else due to human or technical errors.

>The vast majority of PCs and laptops don't come with optical drives and that's been the case for many years now.

That's irelevant because they're not made for you to read them at home but for your doctor or other healthcare facilities to read them, and all these businesses have disc drives on premises and will most likely do so for decades

Unfortunately, drives are not so common these days. I had to go buy an external USB DVD drive to see the images given to me after a scan, just last year.

Great feature of DVD-Rs is that someone across the globe cannot just connect to it and steal medical data.

And the doctor across the globe can never access it to save the patients life.

How often is that a problem?

It could be a problem any time someone travels.

I have a hard time believing that it’s possible to set up a legal and technical framework where patient data can be safely accessed internationally faster than doing another X-ray or whatever might be currently distributed by CD.

Are you serious? You can call pretty much any hospital in the US and request DICOM files sent to your email. Mailing a CD across the world is insane, as is wasting money and radiation budget on yet another CT scan

No serious operation or procedure will be done by any doctor having some mailed x-ray photos.

They will do new one right there and if there is no time - there is no time to mail stuff around.

What kind of nerd fantasy is it?

I went once with x-ray on cd that was weeks old for procedure - doctor there went “yeah cool, I don’t care, it is my risk we do new one by personel I know on equipment I know”.

Is this a regional difference? In the US, my experience has been like the other poster, it's normal for them to wait days or weeks for xrays from radiology specialty places. Maybe it's a rural thing where many providers don't have their own radiologist and end up outsourcing it.

I think the distinction is, the Dr orders the x-rays from a place they have a relationship with and waiting for it, vs, you bringing x-rays from some unknown source.

I'd say never because no sane medical professional will be operating or doing any procedure on "some CD from somewhere", pretty much the same with mailing that out.

They want scans/tests from trusted source to make decisions about person health/life. The only thing they can trust is whatever they have close and used for years.

If there is no time to get a new scan/test I think there is no time to download stuff or wait for someone to email things.

This is nonsense, doctors routinely order scans from other doctors or hospitals who have equipment and then view the results.

From the ones they know not somewhere across the globe like mentioned above.

Idk; we don't live in the cdrom world any more, it was replaced by high speed internet. The rest of this comment thread seems to answer as if we are asking this question today; and not in 1994 when 56k modems were still a thing and cds were routinely mailed.

I brought my CT scans on disc to my ortho who didn't have a CT machine in the last 300 days.

How about, hear me out for a sec, you email/file-share the data off the disc to the doctor abroad in those cases when you need to. Mind-blowing, right?

If it's indeed a life saving situation as you say, a doctor will have to do scans there and not wait to receive possibly outdated imaging data from another country

Also, no hospital in my country is just gonna release my private medical records on the spot because a doctor from another country called and told them to. There's some formal paperwork that needs to be signed by the pacient and if you're in a coma then you can't sign it and if it's an emergency you don't have time for that whole process so they'll have to perform the scans there.

The case of having to quickly send/receive pacient data to or from doctors abroad is not something most public hospitals in my country are prepped for not will they since it's super niche case and in case of emergency they'll do the scans on the spot.

Which country? I am absolutely sure that here in the Netherlands its never the case. Always by email or printed in rare cases. Less than 1% owns a optical disc nowadays.

> Less than 1% owns a optical disc nowadays.

Sources? That seems way too low.

I would expect most people have at least one CD hidden somewhere in an attic or similar.

I don't have an optical drive connected to any working PC (nor a music CD player) myself, but I still have some CDs lying around the house. Eg a book about learning guitar that I bought second-hand came with a CD.

I imagine they meant drive (not just media). But agreed, do people with game consoles (that splurged for the drive), CD/MiniDisc/SACD/DVD/BluRay/HD DVD/Laser disc players, CD/DVD/BluRay burners, older cars, older PCs/laptops/Mac minis, boom boxes, CDJs.. or multiples thereof not bring the average up?

I have a PERL Cookbook with a mint CD sealed in the cover.

I suspect the percentage of drive owners is a lot lower. But I don't think it would be as low as 1%?

If you restrict to 'drives connected to a multi-purpose device so they can eg display medical images sent on disk' the percentage goes lower (but not sure whether all the way to 1%), because most people wouldn't try to use their game consoles for that.

I don't know about a percentage of households I know, but I do know of several households with literally zero means to play back any physical media. No DVD or Blu-ray players, cars don't have CD players, no computers with optical drives, no game consoles, only maybe a Switch for a game console.

I imagine it's still far from most, but it's definitely starting to be a thing.

Oh, I certainly believe there are plenty of households that don't have any devices that play back optical media.

Apart from some very old laptop (which might or might not work), my household doesn't have any CD nor DVD nor Blu-Ray etc drives. No car either, so we couldn't have a CD player in there.

I just doubt these optical-drive-less households like mine form 99% of all households.

My local place gave me my MRI on a branded thumb drive. After I took it to my Ortho, he said I could use the drive for whatever I wanted

I hate this about that field. I had to scrounge up an external DVD drive from the garage, convert the images and load them onto a medical imaging app on my phone... so that I could show the doctor, who otherwise had to keep going back and forth to another room in the clinic to talk to the tech.

I don't understand why they can't just load it on a website (like MyChart) like any other lab data. The images are big (contains more than pixel data, like xyz layers and gamma) but still compressible.

I don't know if it's HIPAA or tradition, but it really bugs me that I have to keep a DVD drive around solely for imaging. It's like the situation with the IRS and faxing :(

I often request Canadian government records through freedom of information, and they keep sending 10mb PDFs on CD-Rs. They’ve improved a bit recently, but was annoying for a while.

Also learned that a PS4 (or was it a PS5?) cannot open PDFs :(

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