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Websites for Neuroradiologists

David Clunie´s Medical Image Format Site

www.dclunie.com

Author: David Clunie, MD

I am probably carrying coals to Newcastle when I present this site here: As a neuroradiologist, you may have visited it already, as you simply can´t miss Clunie´s site when you search for a DICOM conformance statement or a free DICOM viewer for your personal computer, or if you want to write a program that allows you to read images that were acquired by a CT scanner in the 1980s.

Clunie simply has it all; if it has to do with medical images, it´s there. A brief presentation of this site can hardly do the author justice for the amount of information that he has compiled over the years. (If my memory serves me right, the „Medical Image FAQ“ was already on the Internet before the times of the World Wide Web in the newsgroup alt.image.medical) Just visit the site and see what it has to offer; I can only pick some examples.

This is radiological hardcore stuff; your department´s physicists, however, will love this site when you ask them to read pictures from an old archive tape. Clunie has detailed information about image headers from the days when standardization was only beginning to emerge and DICOM was not even dreamt of. This information is mandatory if you want to (or have to) get access to old images, acquired on, e.g., a GE 9800 or a Siemens DR3 CT scanner from the mid-1980s:

Highly technical data like these are useful, but they are only needed by a handful of specialists.

There are, however, some problems that we all encounter in our daily routine. You want to read CDs with DICOM images on your personal computer? Whether you run Windows®, MacOS®, or some flavour of UNIX®, Clunie probably has the answer.

The list on his site is, to the best of my knowledge, the most comprehensive overview of DICOM viewers that you find on the web (some of these programs will be discussed in future issues of this journal).

In summary, David Clunie´s site is a treasure trove of information for anyone involved in handling, archiving, viewing, or processing medical images; dclunie.com is a must in your bookmark list!

C. Ozdoba, Bern