From: abadmota@yoko.rutgers.edu (Soraya Abad Mota)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x
Subject: SUMMARY: Medical Images in X
Keywords: What are the choices?
Date: 31 Aug 92 20:44:59 GMT
Organization: Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick, N.J.


Original question:
------------------

	An X application needs to display, store and manipulate Medical
	Images, what are the choices in terms of format and routines 
	available? I guess one way would be to use the XImage structure
	and call Xlib routines, are there other alternatives? Would someone
       with experience in this type of application, please give me some advice?

	(Please respond via e-mail, I'll summarize if there's interest.)

	Thanks in advance,
	Soraya Abad-Mota (abadmota@paul.rutgers.edu)
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Thanks to the following people for their answers:

	 Chien-An Chen <giant@delta.eecs.nwu.edu>
	 Paul Anderson  paul@dcs.edinburgh.ac.uk 
	 Frode Kileng <frode.kileng@tf.tele.no>
	 Kevin Samborn samborn@lynchpin.mtkgc.com 
	 rk@nms.hls.com (S Ramakrishnan)
	 Ronald van Loon <rvloon@cv.ruu.nl>
	 nrd@redwood.cray.com (Neal Dalton)
	 sinan@mtesol.boeing.com (Sinan Karasu)
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Summarized answers:

Regarding the format and the manipulation routines.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

1.    If you write your program to process the images like I do, I would 
suggest you to use PGM (portable Grey Map) format (or PPM if colored).
And thus, you can use xv (available via anonymous ftp from export) to
view the image. PGM is very simple and understandable.

2. XImage format.  speed it up with the Shared Memory Extension that lets 
the server acess the image data. The Image Extension to X.

3. PPM format with Ximage operations to transfer between the client and 
the server.

4. PBMPLUS ppm format, which is usually easy to convert to XImage format.

Relevant paper: (although I haven't been able to find a copy of it,
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~   if someone has it, please let me know.)

There is a paper called "Design of a UNIX Workstation Environment for
Medical Image processing" in the Spring 89 EUUG proceedings. 
The authors are ...

	Dirk Tombeir (dirk@primis.vub.ac.be)
and	Frank Deconik (frank@primis.vub.ac.be)

Sources of information:
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
1. The NY Hospital/Cornell University Medical College 
has extensive libraries of medical images. (But I couldn't get a specific
person to contact there.)

2. Hospital Computer Network Discussion Group and Data Base
<HSPNET-L%ALBNYDH2.bitnet@UACSC2.ALBANY.EDU>.

(I suscribed to this mailing list and posed a question more than a week ago,
but haven't gotten a single response. I went through their archive and
didn't find anything relevant to the question at hand.)

(And last but not least...)

A specific software.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
KHOROS, developed at the University of New Mexico, Dept. of Electrical and
Computer Engineering (EECE). 

"Khoros is an integrated software development environ-
ment for information processing and visualization.
Khoros components include a visual programming
language, code generators for extending the visual language
and adding new application packages to the system, an
interactive user interface editor, interactive image display
programs, surface visualization, an extensive library of image
processing, numerical analysis and signal processing routines,
and 2D/3D plotting packages.  X applications built using the Khoros
User Interface Libraries have built in journal/playback and groupware
capabilities.

If you have questions, comments or problems of a general nature,
post to comp.soft-sys.khoros, or mail the Khoros mailing list,
khoros@chama.eece.unm.edu.  To subscribe to the mailing list,
mail to khoros-request@chama.eece.unm.edu."
(Extracted from the README file at the ftp site.)
Newsgroups: comp.windows.x