[ChemicalHarm]

I once was hospitalized and got an x-ray while on a trip. They gave me a CD with the images on it, which I took to a different doctor (not affiliated with the hospital that gave me the X-ray) in my home city later. When the doctor put the CD into his Windows machine, I was shocked to see that it used AutoRun to run an image viewing program stored on the CD! My doctor was not at all surprised to see a totally unfamiliar program running on the same machine that he uses to access all of his patients' medical records, create perscriptions, etc. He told me this was the normal way to share images in different formats across hospitals. (I actually helped him figure out how to figure out the clunky UI of the image viewer.)

Having seen that, I can't say I'm surprised that medical computers of all kinds are full of malware. For all I know, I might have carried a computer virus from the hospital onto the doctor's office computer myself! I saw no sign of that, and the viewing software looked legit (even if it was clunky and hard to use) but viruses that attach to legitimate programs and hide from the user are not new. I hope this changes soon.

[MattRogish]

Wow! That happened to me - I thought it was a fluke. When I thought I broke my foot, I had it x-rayed, and they gave me a burned CD. I put it in my mac and noticed it was autorun.exe, and the images themselves were not readily available. I wonder how much they have to pay the x-ray machine folks for that awesome software vs. exporting a bunch of PNGs?

[cnvogel]

Medical images are typically stored in DICOM files which transport the information used for taking the X-ray image (X-ray energy, pixel-size, patient name and birthday, type of exposure). DICOM is a huge standard that also includes 3D images, ECG or EEG waveforms, ...

While a PNG for sure is adequate for your doctor to see a fracture of your bone or joint, it might be completely unusable for someone who wants to do quantitative analysis: How big is a babies head in a ultrasound? How dense is some bone material for planning radiation therapy?

In these cases the correct metadata is very important. It might of course possible to add it to the PNG standard, but DICOM is already there, and it's established.

And: In theory your doctor would only need one compliant viewer program, but in practice the "export data" functionality of a certain device will burn a DVD that includes the vendor's recommended viewer program.

[89a]

Why doesn't it include the DICOM files then, why is it bundled into an executable