Viewing medical data (CT pictures) on Linux

I recently had to visit a CT institute to produce a series of CT-pictures depicting the internals of my nose (and parts of the head as well). The result was a series of about 120 pictures, each picture showing a small slice of the interesting region. They can be used by a medical doctor to examine the structure of the region of interest for example to prepare for a surgery. In theory it is also possible to create a 3D-model of the recorded region. The institute provided me with the on-paper pictures as well with a CD, containing the examination-results in a dedicated format, called DICOM (Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine). The CD also contains a windows-program to instantly show the results on screen of a windows-computer. But... I do not use windows. How to show them in Linux?

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Submitted by Robert Kapeller on Tue, 12/10/2013 - 15:14
1 answer

Using Mango for DICOM data

One possibility could be to use Wine (Windows emulator) to run the windows program present on the CD. But: Wine often has problems with graphic intense software and the chances, that this would work are rather low.
Surfing the Web showed, that there might be only one decent application to allow the same functionality than the win app.
Mango (http://ric.uthscsa.edu/mango/mango.html) is capable of displaying DICOM picture series and additionally to do additional fancy things needed by a medical doctor e.g. creating 3D models (see homepage for full functionality).
As this is a java program and does not install into the system, e.g. is not accessible via the app-menu some additional steps have to be performed.

  • Download SW from Mango HP
  • Unpack somewhere in your home-folder
  • Start the Gnome Menu editor
  • Add java -jar {path_to_Mango_program} to it

To enable all users to access the program it has to be installed into some global folder (e.g. /opt/Mango). All other steps are same asa above. Note, that only superuser can install into /opt.
Another possible program would be Open DICOM Viewer (http://sourceforge.net/projects/opendicomviewer/) but this program only has limited functionality and cannot compare to the feature richness of Mango. As Open DICOM Viewer is a Java program as well the installation instructions above also apply to it.

Submitted by Robert Kapeller on Tue, 12/10/2013 - 15:38

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