Escape Medical Viewer for Mac

Be sure to check out the excellent FREE open-source OsiriX http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/14362

Escape Medical Viewer is a good DICOM product, built upon QuickTime technology and is available on both the Mac and PC platforms. As a commercial and cross-platform product, it is an easier sell to IT Departments than an open source application. EMV is a good choice for Mac users working in a mixed platform Radiology Dept. IT in most hospitals wants ONE app- not a hodgepodge. EMV allows PC Radiologists and Mac Radiologists to have the same application while using the computer of their choice. The other great advantage is the commercial support available that is not replicated on most open-source software. OsiriX is a great app that is getting better all the time, but many IT Admins or Imaging Directors will balk at the lack of support. If you can find an Apple Value Added Reseller that will support OsiriX, go for it. Otherwise, you will find a great deal of resistance from Administration, IT and the Radiologists. EMV is also more G4 friendly than OsiriX, and would be a good choice for laptop use on a PowerBook for ON-Call image review. For Workstation (read G5 with a good video card and a lot of memory) use, OsiriX. For mobile image review on a G4, use EMV.

So how does this compare to the excellent OsiriX (free) DICOM viewer? OsiriX allows me to view echoes and coronary angiograms in the same interface, and pretty amazing 3D reconstrcution for CT etc. And you can add shapes/ROI's etc, and do some basic calculations with ROI's. Given the price for Escape (>$400) vs the price for OsiriX (free), is this really the best mac Dicom viewer? I doubt it.

EMV is a boon for viewing ultrasound images stored in Dicom format because it can display both stills and movie sequences (clips). Moreover, if a removable medium containing the studies is sourced, EMV shows the entire Dicom file with thumbnails for navigation. It can export stills to Powerpoint (and other files) which allows contrast, brightness and tint to be adjusted as well as imprinted names to be removed. It can also export movies to QuickTime (and others) and here has the important advantage of allowing the file's dimensions to be trimmed so that the patients name, usually placed at the top of the image, can be removed (difficult to achieve in QuickTime and impossible in Media Player). The frame rate can also be adjusted here. All-in-all a superb application for handling medial images. I wish for simple image editing (eg an overlay to obliterate names) and for the Dicom overview to work on studies already on my hard disk - meanwhile, this is a must have for medical imagers! David

Escape Medical Viewer for OS X Demo version I downloaded was easy/intuitive to use. I used the product to view CDs of coronary cine runs and cardiac 2-D echos which were generated by at least three different systems (Philips, Accuson, Siemens). The loops viewed directly using the viewer were of very good quality and it was easy to navigate between different patients and different loops of the same patient. When moving from patient to patient on the same CD, however, the thumbnail views did not change as well. The "get-around" entailed exiting and then re-entering and chosing the desired patient, a bit of a pain in the tush to say the least. But it worked well. On the demo version any exported files carried extensive "watermarks" which obfuscated the image considerably and the subsequent quality of those images is unknown. They APPEAR to be of less quality than the originals, but I can't say this with certainty. The exported files were easily incorporated into Powerpoint presentations, albeit with the watermarks. I'd buy this product if I new for sure that bugs like the thumbnail problem would be corrected and the quality of the exported images was equal to the originals, but I can't tell... I especially like the fact that the product opens and reads many different formats and virtually ALL dicom files, including 2-D echos which others do not.