[compiler-guy]

You don’t print the images an MRI produced, you transmit them to the people who can interpret them, and they are almost never in the same room as the big machine, and sometimes they need to be called up in a different office altogether.

[freehorse]

The comment [0] mentioned that they could not get at all the mri outputs even with the radiologist coming on site. Obviously, software that was processing/exporting the data was running on a computer that was connected online, if not requiring internet connection itself. Data transfer can happen from another computer than the one the data is processed/obtained. Less convenient, but this is common practice in many other places for security and other reasons.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41009018

[salawat]

I mean, this is incentivized by current monetization models. Remove the need to go through a payment based aaS infra, and all the libraries to do the data visualization could be running on the MRI dude's PC.

-aaS by definition requires you to open yourself to someone else to let them do the work for you. It doesn't empower you, it empowers them.

[freehorse]

Yeah I suspect -aaS monetisation models are one of the reasons of the current all-to-internet mess. However, such software running in the machine using a hardware usb key as authenticating is not unheard of either in software like that. I wish that decisions on these subjects were done based on the specific needs of the users rather than the finance people of -aaS companies.