DicomWorks

If you have this icon on your
desktop, you have made a
wise choice.

Even if you have a PACS (Picture Archiving and Communication System) at your workplace, you will occasionally need to analyze some pictures or prepare a presentation when you are out of your office.

This means that you will need a DICOM viewer, i.e., a program that will allow you to view and edit radiological image files and convert them into a format that your graphics program can read, e.g., into a jpg file.

Windows® users don’t have to look for expensive commercial viewer/converter programs; they can use DicomWorks, which is a free software with an impressive list of features.

(For the Mac world, there is another program that will be presented in one of the next issues of Clinical Neuroradiology.)

The program is free, but the authors require a registration; it is only fair that they want to know who is using the program when you consider the work that went into the creation of DicomWorks.

The screenshots above (shown on the DicomWorks website) illustrate
some of the program’s features.

The viewer includes thumbnail preview, multi-panel display, measurement functions and support for multiframe and „lossy compression“ images. What makes DicomWorks particularly interesting is the wide range of import/export options:

You can export DICOM images as picture files (jpg, bmp, tiff, png, and numerous others), create video sequences or even create complete DICOM archives on other media (hard drives or CD-ROM). Other features include ftp and e-mail support; you can build a teleradiology system around DicomWorks.

A separate plug-in (also free) allows you to export images directly to PowerPoint; this feature comes in handy when you are preparing a presentation.

In summary, DicomWorks is a great program for everyone who wants to or has to handle image files away from scanner hardware or a PACS.

Even if DicomWorks should become shareware (currently, it’s free, but the authors mention this possibility), I would still strongly recommend it. The selfexplanatory, very functional interface and the large number of import/export functions make it an ideal tool for anyone professionally involved with radiological images.

Christoph Ozdoba, Bern