I’m continually amazed by the variety of software available as open source. I just found the business card for OsiriX, an open source medical visualization tool for OS X. It supports the standard formats for medical data (DICOM, standing for Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine) and is amazing to watch in action. I saw it demoed at WWDC earlier this year. Like all good open source, it scratches an itch; in this case OsiriX is by radiologists and for radiologists. It was amazing in action, and has been generating lots of buzz. Because it runs on conventional hardware, doctors can do interesting things like carry scans around on an iPod or similar external drive rather than burn them to CDs as they have to at the moment. I thought that was worth an “attaboy”.
