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OsiriX

http://www.osirix-viewer.com

There are many good reasons to buy an Apple computer. No, I will not enter the never-ending discussion about various operating systems’ respective merits and flaws. What I want to show you, however, is one more good reason to get a machine that is running Apple’s “MacOS X” operating system. This good reason has a name: OsiriX.

The screenshots in this report were made with an OsiriX installation on a 17" MacBook Pro running MacOS X 10.5.1 (“Leopard”).

When you visit the OsiriX website, you will discover the extent of the OsiriX world that ranges from an “OsiriX Wiki” (http://osirixmac.com) to third-party plug-ins with further extended functions.

OsiriX itself, however, is free, and the list of functions included in the standard distribution (40 MB to download, 140 MB on your disk after installation) is already impressive.

I cannot give a full overview; the menus shown in the screenshots give an impression: export in numerous formats, create movies, generate 2-D, 3-D, 4-D (timeresolved) or 5-D datasets (3-D with temporal and functional information), perform image arithmetics, superimpose datasets (e.g., CT and PET), and more ...

An easy task for OsiriX: generation of a maximum intensity projection (MIP) from an MR time-of-flight angio dataset.

The program is intuitively usable; for basic functions, you don’t need the manual.

There are numerous buttons, sliders, and menus that allow the user to customize the graphic output.

A sample submenu that shows the various formats in which images can be exported.

In total, OsiriX offers a functionality that is comparable (or even superior) to some commercial image processing packages in the five- or six-figure price range. As the program is free, all you need to buy is a Mac – and OsiriX is a good reason to do so ...

Christoph Ozdoba, Bern, Switzerland