Oh! Gizmo

By Brian Liszewski

If you’ve ever been to the hospital for a broken bone, or have seen a character on House or E.R. suffer the same fate, you’ve probably seen those old-fashioned lightboxes hanging on the walls that doctors use to read x-rays. But a company called BrainLAB is bringing those lightboxes into the 21st century by replacing them with a 30-inch iPhone-esque touch screen that’s linked to a hospital’s digital PACs or Picture Archiving System.

The Digital Lightbox can be mounted in an O.R., treatment room or doctor’s office, and it uses an intuitive touch-based interface like Microsoft’s Surface or the iPhone OS. It allows medical personnel to examine various types of images including MRIs, x-rays, PET scans as well as 3D data, and even allows multiple scans or photos to be layered so they can be easily compared. Like the iPhone, images can be navigated or enlarged with the flick of a finger but unlike the iPhone, the Digital Lightbox can also load non-proprietary file types like WMVs or AVIs.

[ BrainLAB's Digital Lightbox ] VIA [ Medgadget ]