I started using OsiriX in its early “beta” days as a resident in the University Hospital in Mannheim, Germany. As I was a Mac enthusiast I was looking for a DICOM viewer for my favorite system. I already worked with several Windows based applications from e.g. Siemens and Merge and I knew their specific features, advantages and drawbacks. OsiriX rapidly became my viewer of choice in all scientific and teaching work and I regularly switched to OsiriX to assist primary reading of DICOM images of all kind.
To me, the major advantages of the OsiriX application are the stunning speed, its workflow flexibility and the variety of features, including more exotic use cases like the included web server. OsiriX offers advanced image manipulation possibilities but keeps the user interface clean and clear. Helpful features like the automatically arranging “magnetic windows” and intelligent multi-viewer syncing assist speeding up the workflow. Most physicians are not computer specialists and often refuse to learn an application in a steep training curve – OsiriX allows them to focus on their daily medical work.
Today I work in a private practice for Radiology and Nuclear Medicine with several reading rooms, all of them equipped with OsiriX workstations. The radiologists can configure their OsiriX setups to match their individual needs, including viewer arrangements, keyboard shortcuts and automated images flow across the PACS network. In my eyes, one of most important advantage of OsiriX over competing systems is the easy access to the developers, who include requested features a lot faster, and regularly add innovative features and support for new DICOM objects in short release periods.