A few weeks ago I was approached by a potential client who asked me to develop software that analyzes images produced by digital CT scans.  In order to give him an estimate, I needed to figure out how much work would be involved creating all the required functionality, and if it would even be possible to do with a “slow” language such as Flex/ActionScript (the client wanted an interactive web application).

Luckily (or rather unluckily) I had a CT scans done fairly recently, so I contacted the radiology department at UPMC Presbyterian and requested a copy of my scans.  A day later, I stopped by their office and picked up a shiny CD containing some seriously spooky images of my skull.

At first, I was pretty excited.  I figured that I’d just pull all images from the disk, group them into proper views and try to write a quick-and-dirty algorithm that would compare appropriate images and mark difference between them.

As soon as I popped the disk into my MacBook Pro, my enthusiasm quickly began to evaporate.  There were no images on the disk, or at least I could not find any by browsing through the folders.  The viewing software included on the CD was for Microsoft Windows only, and since I did not want to wait to get to my office, I had to install a Windows 7 virtual machine on my Mac.

A couple of hours later, I was finally able to launch Phillips iSite Viewer, the software that came on the CT scan disk.  After another 20 minutes of poking around, I found out that there is no way to batch-export all the images – the software only allows you to do export images one-by-one.

Becoming increasingly frustrated, I ran a few searches on Google and found that I wasn’t the only one with this problem – lack of a MacOS version and an open file format have made Phillips iSite Viewer pretty much useless for quite a number of users/developers.  What’s even worse is that Phillips’ proprietary format prevents industry standard applications such as OsiriX from viewing CT scans from Phillips CDs.

I sent 4 emails to Phillips and did not receive a response. 

I understand why companies develop proprietary systems to protect their intellectual properties.  However, in this day and age, it seems pretty silly to cut out developers from building on top of your company’s product. 

I firmly believe that Apple’s policies on iPhone apps and the fact that users cannot upgrade hard drives and RAM in new unibody MacBook Pros will hurt Apple in the long run.  Similarly, all the current online e-book stores selling DRM’d books will learn their lessons the hard way. 

No matter how great the hardware is, if companies refuse to provide scalable software to go along with their products, they will eventually start losing users to more flexible systems.