A type of file many people don’t know about – and hopefully will never need to – is DICOM, which stands for Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine. i.e. DICOM is a standard widely used in the medical industry for communicating and managing medical images and associated data, such as x-rays, CT scans, and so on.
Thomas Milius has, unfortunately, had a recent need to look at such files relating to a close relative, and found the software available on RISC OS a bit wanting. An old port of ImageMagick to RISC OS was theoretically capable of accessing the files but, he said, delivered unsatisfying results in most cases.
To address this and take a proper look at the files, he looked at the specification for DICOM files, and wrote his solution, which he has now released under the name MediMan. The program is a simple parser for DICOM files, and will extract as much information as possible – bearing in mind it is a very complicated format, so may not work in every case – displaying some contents in a taskwindow, and any saves enclosed data such as pictures as sprites.
Thomas explains that the ability to view DICOM files is anything but a ‘must have’ on RISC OS – if you need to look at such files, it means something is wrong with someone’s health. However, if you do have that need, there is now a way to do it.
Free to download, the software can be found from the Computer Activities section of Thomas’ homepage.
