Several years ago, I had a CT scan of my jaw. The dentist wasn't sure if she was allowed to give me a copy of the scan, which led me to ask "who owns the copyright to my medical images?" I still don't have an answer to the copyright question - but I do now have a copy of a CT scan!
Last week - following some dental trauma - I had another scan of my head. The dentist took great delight in showing me my bones in 3D. So I asked for a copy.
This was something he'd never done before! So, together, we navigated the software, found the export button, and generated a copy. Even zipped up it was half a gigabyte - a bit too much for email and, not unreasonably, he didn't want me plugging in strange USB devices to his medical equipment. So he sent it over WeTransfer. Possibly not the most secure method for my medical data, but I didn't really have time to set up a personal SFTP site or teach him about installing WSL so he could SCP the content. Ah well, needs must.
Unzipped, the folder was about 700MB. Of that, 400MB was taken up by the included Windows app "Ez3D-i". Unsurprisingly, it didn't run on Linux.
The other 300MB was taken up by 450 .DCM files. These are medical images in the DICOM format. This is a relatively open standard which uses JPG plus lots of metadata. There are dozens of Linux programs which can read this - although many haven't been updated in years.
The easiest GUI for viewing the images is Mango. It presents a view of the CT Scan that you can move around.
But once you get the hang of it, you can manipulate the 3D scan and view it from all angles. It's possible to peel away the soft tissue and do all sorts of other fancy trickery. Even on my laptop without a fancy graphics card, it was fast. Here's a quick animation showing the (false colour) version.
If you have had a CT scan, please do ask for a copy of the DICOM files. It is great fun to explore around your own body.
Now I just need to find a way to import this into my Meta Quest so I can enjoy these teeth in VR!
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