3
White Paper
Integrating Mac Systems into
a Medical IT Infrastructure
Executive Summary
As medical imaging devices grow more advanced, radiology teams increasingly rely
on independent imaging workstations. Despite the obvious value of a resource solely
dedicated to viewing and postprocessing radiological images, the signicant expense
of traditional commercial solutions has made imaging-only workstations too costly for
many facilities around the world.
Fortunately, this is changing, but not because proprietary solutions have suddenly
become aordable. Rather, radiologists are now beneting from the convergence
of two important technology trends: the availability of an open source application
known as OsiriX, and the growing adoption of aordable yet powerful Apple Mac Pro
computers and the Mac OS X operating system for medical imaging.
With rapid development within the open source community, OsiriX has evolved into
a powerful and user-friendly tool for radiological work. With Apple Mac Pro hardware
and the Mac OS X operating system, an OsiriX workstation allows radiologists to work
eciently with the high-volume image data sets produced by modern imaging devices,
and it oers sophisticated algorithms to enable multidimensional reconstruction. And
all of this is available at a fraction of traditional radiology workstation prices.
While the Mac platform is widely used in scientic research, it is true that many IT
departments remain hesitant to adopt the Mac platform for clinical use. Some IT
managers assume it is dicult to integrate Mac systems with their existing Microsoft
Windows-dominated environments.
Personal, hands-on experience has proven otherwise. This white paper is intended
to illustrate how budget-constrained organizations can more aordably acquire the
imaging workstations they need. The report shows how organizations can integrate
a Mac-based OsiriX workstation into a real-world medical IT setting, with expectations
that it will perform satisfactorily on a daily basis. The paper outlines the steps required
to deploy such a workstation within a Microsoft Windows-centric environment. And
it addresses topics that radiology departments everywhere must consider, including
legal requirements, IT and patient data security, and display quality.
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