Other Approaches to Medical Image Acquisition

In the best of all possible worlds, all medical imaging studies would be digital.
- All of the different imaging machines, magnetic resonance (MRI), CT, ultrasound, etc., would be networked together.
- Their data would all be stored centrally, accessible to all workstations.
- An Amiga computer could easily be attached to this network, displaying images from all the different modalities.
The reality is quite different.
- Different manufacturers use different, proprietary image formats which are unreadable on their competitors machines.
- Machines from different manufacturers are often difficult to network.
- Different manufacturers have different, proprietary formats for their storage media.
  - One manufacturer's hard drive cannot, for example be read by a competitor.
All of this is changing.
- Because of the need to send medical images to other hospitals and even to physicians at home (teleradiology), standards are gradually being accepted.
- Patient demographics, images, voice files, and reports are being integrated.
The future is not yet here.
- Until such time as all studies (include "plain x-rays") are digital and image and storage formats correspond to ones commonly used in computing, incorporating images into Amiga applications will mean digitizing film.

revised -- December, 2002