Medical imagery comes alive on Windows 8!

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Hands down the most underutilized feature of HealthVault to date has been our ability to store and share full-fidelity DICOM images. Not only is medical imagery incredibly valuable for diagnosis and tracking purposes, it’s also super-expensive and generally non-trivial to acquire --- something I relearned just the other day when I spent the morning inside a CT machine with a contrast IV line.

Using HealthVault Connection Center, you can easily upload images from a CD or DVD into HealthVault, where we’ll keep them safe, enable you to share them with others online, and burn as many new copies as you need for second opinions or referrals. If you’re lucky, your imaging center may be able to sidestep the CD altogether and send directly to HealthVault using a solution like this one from Candelis. You should be doing this!

And now, a new app from Mobile Solutions --- Medical Image Vault --- provides an incredibly rich viewing experience for your images on your Windows 8 laptop or tablet. These folks have already created great apps on Windows Phone and Android, but their new touch-first interface on Windows 8 is really something special. Just take a look at a few screenshots from my account (click to enlarge):

 

The detail you can see by pinch-zooming is just amazing. Downloading images can take a few seconds, but that’s just a matter of bandwidth --- there’s just a lot of data to fetch. And the app does a great job of on-demand loading so that it only pulls down what you’re looking at, so it’s not a big deal.

Of course, the app is meant for personal, not professional, viewing. But having the ability to pop open your laptop and give a preview to a specialist or other caregiver is a huge win, and if they need to do a “real” read, just burn them off a copy and you’re good to go.

Medical Image Vault is the perfect companion to our own Windows 8 application --- together they turn your device into a powerful tool to manage health and wellness for you and your family. So…. What are you waiting for?