iPods aren't just for listening any more, nor are they just for fun. In my September 20, 2005 post iPod Helps Radiologists Manage Medical Images I mentioned how radiologists are using iPods to store medical images. Dr. Ratib and Antoine Rosset, M.D., a radiologist in Geneva, Switzerland, recently developed OsiriX, Macintosh-based software to display and manipulate of medical image data.

In an October 26, 2005 article on CNN, 'I use my iPod to store medical images' by Osman Ratib, goes into a little more detail about using iPods as a medical image storage devices an how he had to convert the Diacom images (radiology image standard) to jpeg so that it can be viewed on video iPods.

Dr. Ratib and his colleagues have hit on something big. The open source software is free, and is available for people to download, use, and improve. According the Ratib, recent surveys estimate that there are 6,000 active worldwide users and over the past two months the site averaged 200 download per day, with peaks up to 1,000 downloads day as new versions were released.

***Krafty's personal note***
Talk to your radiologists today about this, see if they are interested! I happened to run into the Director of Pathology and I asked him if he would be interested in seeing some brief articles on using iPods as image storage devices. He gave me a huge smile and said that he had just finished talking with our IT person about storing and transporting image files and what they could use to best accomplish this. He said he was thinking of PDAs but it had never occurred to him to use iPods. So, he was very happy to get information on that.