[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