Ambassadors

I am a private practice radiologist specializing in musculoskeletal (MSK) radiology. I first began using OsiriX many years ago when our group migrated to a Windows based PACS. I found the PACS, and Windows in general, counterintuitive. In particular I was drawn to OsiriX because of its ease of use, strong support community, and the fast response of the developers to issues that users would bring to their attention.

One of the areas where I find OsiriX most useful is in MDCT. Typical MSK CTs have thousands of images. In areas of complex anatomy, such as the foot/ankle, wrist and spine it is very useful to have rapid 3D volume rendering and multiplanar reformation. While our technologists routinely do standard 3-plane reformations, particular pathology (e.g. Lisfranc injuries) can benefit from radiologist guided reformations specific to the area of pathology. Additionally, I have found the rapid multiplanar reformations of OsiriX to be very useful in analyzing CT arthrograms. This is particularly true for assessing subtle SLAP lesions or meniscal tears. These images can be exported to PACS.

A third area where OsiriX excels is the ROI tools. The Cobb angle tool is a life saver. In fact, the multi-million dollar PACS system that our group purchased doesn’t even include this basic functionality. I read many MRIs and there again the ROI functions have been especially useful in measuring the tibial tuberosity trochlear groove distance. Once measured, the image can be easily exported to the PACS for future reference and for clinician access.

We are a French medical center with 5 specialists in rheumatology with two radiology rooms, a bone densitometry and 2 ultrasounds devices.

Naturally, when we moved to digitization we are studying the possibilities to share studies and create a PACS. Three of 5 physicians were working on Mac OS. In the absence of serious competition, our project was realized with the establishment of OsiriX platform. Its extreme ease of installation and use, its openness to the other 2 PCs and our FUJI console as well as its free distribution were the major factors in our choice.

Choosing OsiriX was part of our policy of “all open source” with openoffice for office, MedinTux for managing patient records and for our windows virtualbox virtualization.

In addition, the active international community of users, the spirit of mutual aid, quality and relevance of responses encouraged us and eases the task. The proximity of the Pixmeo team reassured us. The use of the web portal OsiriX has transformed our daily practice by opening our database to other users.

I started using OsiriX around the year 2004, with version 1.6 introducing SUV calculations for PET. I had previously worked with softwares developed in our laboratory. The ergonomics of our softwares were adapted to the needs of the users and it appeared to me that OsiriX was designed with the same philosophy. Osirix rapidly became essential to my clinical and research work on PET-CT. Nowadays I use OsiriX for my clinical workflow in nuclear medicine, including PET-CT, SPECT-CT, planar and dynamic imaging.

Anyone who is looking for a platform-independent and multi-modal DICOM viewer for nuclear medicine should consider some of the following reasons why I have been using OsiriX for more than 10 years: It has optimal display of any DICOM modality with adapted color tools (e.g. fixed zero for nucmed images), comprehensive support of multi-modal imaging with relevant toolboxes and color look-up tables, 3D-surface rendering (e.g. bone SPECT-CT) and ease of use as the layout is intuitive making the learning curve very short for newbies. The premium support is very responsive, you get access to the developpers quite quickly and the integration within the hospital IT is really straightforward. It is also cost-effective as any analysis will demonstrate that OsiriX has no real competition as far as the features-to-cost ratio is concerned.

I have been a radiologist for sixteen years and I am now the chief radiologist in a 160-bed multi-speciality tertiary care teaching hospital in Salem, a city in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu. I work with three other radiologists in our hospital. We are equipped with DR, CR, OPG, mammography, colour Doppler ultrasound scanners, 128-slice CT, 1.5 T MRI and a cath lab. We are predominantly a diagnostic radiology department, but we do a fair number of image-guided interventions, including chronic pain relief procedures. Though our equipment runs on different operating systems, the radiologists work almost exclusively on Macs.

I have been using OsiriX since 2003, it was version 0.2 at that time. I have seen OsiriX evolve from a robust viewer to a very versatile workstation over this time. In these past twelve years, I have tried other DICOM viewers and workstations, almost all of them Windows-based, and I have never found them to even come close to OsiriX in performance and ease of use. I don’t even have to mention how OsiriX leverages the Mac’s hardware and OS X’s software resources. I would just mention simple things like how OsiriX allows for easy customisation of the DICOM viewer (the annotations tab in preferences) and how easy it is to create report templates and report from OsiriX. Of course, the addition of OsiriX mobile app has made life easier for all who use it in their iPhones or iPads. It has eliminated the need to carry my MacBook Pro when I travel. I just view CT or MRI images on my iPad and give an oral report on my iPhone or send a short email with the salient findings. OsiriX MD with its additional workstation features is extremely useful, especially for coronary CT angiograms. I love the BI-RADS and coronary angiography report plugins.

I am a Consultant Neuroradiologist at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital, Glasgow and founder and director of “Neuroradiology Workshop”, a brand of interactive courses which we deliver using OsiriX, whereby each delegate is given an iMac to review images.

OsiriX has revolutionized radiology teaching within the UK in that all radiology schools use the software as the Royal College of Radiologists examinations are conducted using this software. Partly on this basis and that its user interface is very easy to master, we conduct courses for a variety of medical specialties who use imaging in their everyday management of patients. Feedback from delegates has been extremely positive about how user friendly the software is.

Furthermore DICOM files retrieved from PACS are very easy to be processed and edited to be viewed on OsiriX. I wouldn’t consider using any other DICOM software.

As an interventional cardiologist, I routinely use OsiriX to view my patient’s coronary angiograms, cardiac CT and MR, as well as to perform 3D volumetric reconstruction of the left atrium, for catheter ablation of Atrial Fibrillation.

OsiriX, through its reconstruction tools, empowers our knowledge of heart’s anatomy in a simple and intuitive way, improving the preoperative planning for electrophysiological, cardiac and vascular procedures. Therefore contributing to a better outcome.

I have not yet found anything comparable to OsiriX MD with a MacBook Pro. Being able to use OsiriX on a portable computer made it an unparalleled advanced portable workstation. In our hospital, OsiriX is also used as a PACS for radiology and cardiology, running on a MacPro with 8TB in RAID5. We already have more than 20 million images stored in more than 29,000 exams. Properly configured, OsiriX as a PACS proved to be very stable and reliable. Physicians and patients frequently use the web portal to view and share their exams. In Brazil OsiriX is very popular and now ANVISA certified, there is no similar affordable software in its category.

If I could make an analogy, I would say that OsiriX is today the Photoshop of DICOM images, truly the best.

I have chosen OsiriX because it has all of the most advanced features compared to expensive alternatives and is truly perfect.

I believe that it helped me a lot and nothing compares to it when it comes to reliability. One of the best things I like about this software is that it is useful in teaching, researching or reviewing. This is even more beneficial for patient care or clinical workflow. OsiriX also has a plug-in architecture that gives the opportunity of expanding its capabilities and I really enjoyed the experience of developing a plugin to measures paths from 3D surfaces (3D SurfaceLength).

With its ultrafast performance and intuitive interactive user interface, I assure you that this is the best DICOM viewer I had the opportunity to use. One of the finest things to love about this software is that it has its innovative technique intended for 3D/4D/5D navigation. The visualization and navigation of multidimensional and multimodality images is made possible with the use of OsiriX. As an OsiriX user, also an OsiriX teacher and an OsiriX researcher, I am just one of those who are amazed because of it being entirely different, flexible, intuitive and an open future in imaging. Thus, I highly recommend this software.

OsiriX has been the only reason for me to switch back to OS X a decade ago as it was and remains the ideal workstation for clinical imagers and researchers in medical imaging. In my practice, OsiriX not only has the ability to robustly handle large databases of images and to integrate perfectly in a local PACS. It also contains a myriad of useful and unique tools that accelerate our daily work in reading exams. As a cardiovascular radiologist, it is uniquely designed to handle and display Cardiac MR examination with the best existing flexibility.

OsiriX fills the gap between clinical workstations and research workstations by allowing users to develop plugins. Our research group in CREATIS chose OsiriX to transfer the Matlab code of inTag in a plugin to accelerate diffusion of a dedicated software for MR tagging images. Today, it remains the only non-commercial solution with that capabilities.

In OsiriX, we are always insured to provide our tools to the largest number of potential users that enjoy not only a flexible, fast and modern DICOM viewer but also the best solution to accelerate the transfer of our research tools to the community.

Eight years ago, in the radiology department where I was working, we started looking for an alternative DICOM viewer that was easy to use, feature rich and affordable. We had tried a few other DICOM viewers before but they were either too slow, difficult to use, tightly integrated with their proprietary PACS or simply too expensive. OsiriX came as a natural choice fulfilling all our needs and kept getting better with each version, with improvements in speed, reliability and usability.

There are literally hundreds of features integrated into the software making it extremely versatile and able to fill in various roles in a medical imaging department. For example, it is a more than capable DICOM viewer but it can also be used as a (mini) PACS. It is not tied to a particular PACS system and can be used together with any PACS or modality that is DICOM compliant. As a long-term investment, perhaps its strongest point is its open plugin architecture, allowing third parties to extend its capabilities. There are already several dozens of plugins available, both free, from the academia, and commercial. Last but not least, it is very reasonably priced with a flexible licensing model.

OsiriX is definitely one of the best DICOM viewers on the market today and arguably the most versatile one.

As a surgeon at a university hospital in Japan, I have building my own surgical roadmaps on my Mac Pro using OsiriX, which I found by browsing the Apple Web site in 2004. I was looking for ways to use imaging technology to improve surgical procedures. The combination of OsiriX and the Mac presented interesting possibilities.

We wanted to improve the way we navigate during major surgery. When we perform aggressive surgeries such as those for pancreatic cancer, we have to remove many organs, blood vessels, and lymph nodes if needed. If the cancer has invaded the vascular system, we have to determine its surgical margin to complete the resection and the vascular reconstruction. We knew pre-operative volume visualization would help us to be more efficient in the operating room.

Now we have a Japanese translation of OsiriX, which makes it even easier for us. Students and residents can use it easily. And we can do the segmentation on our personal desktops or laptops anytime. This is important: even if we’re working in the outpatient department at midnight, we can use OsiriX on a Mac to create 3D volumes from CT slices.

Surgeons and physicians familiar with OsiriX know it’s easy to work with OsiriX volumetric images, and that OsiriX handles segmentation and 3D rendering of DICOM images with ease. And they can see the value that visualization can have in the OR.

I have given presentations in many Japanese institutions explaining my techniques. Each presentation is usually followed by requests to give it elsewhere, including the US, Asia, and EU. A number of surgeons have seen the presentation, purchased Macs, downloaded OsiriX, and started using my visualization methods in surgery.

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.

I came across OsiriX in its beginning in the late 90s. My scientific focus at that time was cardiac imaging in MRI. Preparing presentations showing cine loops was so easy with OsiriX and the Apple Quicktime architecture compared to the PC/AVI hassle my colleagues had.

What I like about OsiriX is its intuitive way to work – you can feel, that it’s software for radiologists created from radiologists. It is a fully integrated radiology workstation with post procession abilities you won’t find in competitive products.

I find me quite often doing 3D or curved MPR reconstruction on my iMac on my desktop instead of using the expensive highend tools that I have nextdoor because it’s so easy and fast to use.

Beside of its tremendeous diagnostic capabilities (pushed even further with a lot of useful plugins) it’s a multipurpose swiss army knife for a plethora of DICOM tasks. We have plenty of Mac minis in our institution for webserver functionality, routing, semi-automated CD import and even CD burning all done with OsiriX.

OsiriX is a powerful medical software available on Macintosh platform and is perhaps the best that I have used. OsiriX is user-friendly, heavily customizable and has several features that makes it one of the best DICOM viewers.

I mainly use OsiriX for teaching and harvesting cases for personal, departmental and regional digital radiology museum. I also use the inbuilt web-server function of OsiriX to host cases on our local departmental network to facilitate ‘Learning From Discrepancy Meeting’.

OsiriX allows DICOM files to be imported from a PACS, comprehensively anonymized, and viewed with all the functions of a standard PACS workstation, including multi-planar reformatting, maximum and minimum intensity projections and 3D volume rendering. This allows cases to be presented in a style more familiar to today’s trainees, developing their skills of systematic evaluation, interpretation and knowledge of pathology.

The inbuilt database and search functions allow highly effective cataloguing and retrieval of cases. Several user-definable database fields allow the input of keywords such as diagnosis, body part, and disease type, and subsequent search of the teaching image library using these. OsiriX when used on a dual-screen mode, teaching becomes a highly interactive and an enjoyable experience.

I am leading the OsiriX-UKuserGroup, a group of Radiologists in UK with a vision to achieve a collective common platform for Radiology Education across the country.

As an OsiriX ambassador, I would strongly recommend OsiriX as simply the best available DICOM viewer for Clinical Practice, Teaching and Research.

In March 2004, what a “divine surprise”: OsiriX first beta is out just before ECR ! Before, there were very few solutions to view DICOM images on a Mac, once OsiriX had arisen a true and useful DICOM workstation on Mac OS X was now available. Year after year OsiriX became more and more powerful.

With OsiriX I could do lot of tasks not available on our old workstations at that time: rapidly and conveniently reformat, 3D, virtual endoscopy. Now we have post-processing servers and PACS but I continue to work on OsiriX for some post-processing tasks such as MPR, 3D, Metadata analysis…

In my department, when radiologists are on duty, they receive examinations performed during night on their home computer. Half of us have a Mac and I installed OsiriX on those Macs in 2006. Since, I can work at home with the same quality of work than inside my department for diagnosis. At last, in France, examinations are given to patients with few relevant printed images and a CD/DVD with all images of the examination. Robots burn CD/DVDs with a PC viewer but nothing for Mac. Before OsiriX all referent physicians working on Mac were disappointed to be unable to view his or her patient’s examination. Since OsiriX creation I showed them how to download and install it on their Mac and they love it. Now in my department OsiriX is burned on the CD/DVDs.

With over 25 years of experience as a radiologist and having built my own PACS in 1992, I unhesitatingly endorse OsiriX as simply the best PACS workstation software in existance. Running on the 5K iMac, nothing in the industry even comes close, regardless of price!

We began using OsiriX 1.0 and never looked back. Our image interpretation productivity markedly improved and continues to remain high due to the continual updates (2-3 per year) of OsiriX by the same, dedicated development team.

On day one of using our new GE Discovery MR750W 3T scanner, we had a case of a teenage girl with a few, small white matter lesions. Using the fusion tool of OsiriX (500 micron 3D T2 FLAIR + SWAN), we made a definitive diagnosis of multiple sclerosis by confirming a central vein within a periventricular lesion.

I am an Obstetrician and Gynecologist in Private Practice, in Windhoek, doing my own Ultrasounds. The first email I can find in my records referring to OsiriX dates from 2008, but I recall having started to use it at least the year before. At that stage I was using a GE Logiq 100 Pro storing images on hardcopy only without option to connect to a PACS. However the local Radiology practice had an MRI which could store images on DVD and I came across OsiriX via Google Search. That worked so well that when I had to replace my Ultrasound in 2011 I acquired a GE Logiq C5 Premium with DICOM Option connected via ethernet to my Mac.

Every Ultrasound I do is archived on the Mac and though retention of hardcopies is required by the insurance companies I do not recall ever reviewing them in clinical practice any longer. Since the Radiology practice has digitalized I receive their images (mainly Mammograms) on DVD which I then import into OsiriX. However, they are experimenting with electronic delivery and since they may open a branch in my building I might even be able to get all the images online. Being able to compare previous images on screen makes a big difference especially with regards to demonstrating to the patient. But also in cases of referrals or presentations being able to (re)generate images is very convenient. I also use OsiriX HD on the iPad mini and regularly load images via WiFi for demonstration purposes.

I’ve used OsiriX since I was a Radiology Resident in 2005. I bought a MacBook Pro to be able to experiment with this exciting new program called OsiriX. Soon after installing it, I discovered the world of multiplanar reformatting. My department didn’t have any advanced visualization tools at the time so having access to OsiriX was an important part of my journey into becoming an expert in 3D visualization.

With OsiriX, I’m able to maintain a dedicated workstation in my office for the primary purpose of collecting and maintaining my teaching file. It is awesome to be able to pull cases from PACS, import from a CD, or import a downloaded zip file. I can then add the diagnosis in the comments column and add modifiers in the comments 2 and 3 columns to further sort the cases i.e. “aorta” or “iatrogenic”. This makes it easy to sort and find cases, as well as create teaching file presentations. Whether by drag-and-drop directly into keynote or exporting cine cardiac functional videos or creating the perfect oblique plane to display the salient abnormality, OsiriX is the key to an effortless, efficient teaching file.

It also triples as a research workstation. The ability to perform quantitative measurements from simple ROIs to more complex segmented volumes is wonderful. Not to mention the speed. Usually the rate-limiting step in any imaging research project is the loading of the cases. This is not a problem in OsiriX.

As a surgeon, specialized in orthopedic surgery, I depend on the analysis of radiological images to evaluate medical conditions and planification of future surgeries for each and every patient. Radiological documents involving various modalities such as plain films, Computer Tomograms (CT), Magnetic Resonance Images (MRI), scintigrams and others are provided by various sources on diverse supports such as CD-ROMS, digital supports or files. Instead of switching between various viewer applications, such as those included on Radiolographic CDs,
I have been relying on the OsiriX application as my unique viewer and image analysis tool over the last ten years and do not plan to change anytime soon.

The main reasons for using OsiriX in my daily practice are following:

• Intuitive and reactive interface.
• Importation into OsiriX of documents from various file formats or supports (CD, Centralized PACS systems, internet etc.) is as easy as drag and drop. Exportation on various supports is an available feature.
• Plugins allowing specific image analysis are available on the web. We have developed a 2D planification plugin that we use daily prior to every hip arthroplasty procedure.
• Beautiful 3D reconstructions, based on CT files, can be created using the OsiriX interface. These views are a tremendous help for pre- and post-operative visualization of complex skeletal lesions such as pelvic and acetabulum fractures. These tridimentional views can be exported as movies and pasted into Powerpoint presentations.
• Exportation of images to JPEG, TIFF, or other formats is easy.
• Patient’s files can be sorted, classified and retrieved using the intuitive interface.

I am not aware of any radiographic viewer that matches OsiriX’s versatility and can recommend the use of this application to every orthopaedic surgeon or physician.