I recently had a few different scans of my body and brain done. Hooray for turning 40! At each imaging center I was given a USB drive “with my images on them.” It turns out those images are in a format called DICOM, and they usually come bundled with some kind of viewer application.

These things are a disaster!

  • When you open them, you get to input a password made wholly of easily-findable data like date of birth and national ID number.
  • The folder structure is a mess and differs from provider to provider. Just finding the DICOM is annoying even for my doctors.
  • They ship old versions of free DICOM viewer software like MicroDicom and Weasis. These naturally fail OS integrity checks, which means you either get to bail, dig through OS settings, or call your grandson.
  • The disks have known security insanity on them like autoexec.bat. In 2026!

This could be improved easily:

  • in addition to the DICOM files, generate a JPG per slice. This is all that most patients will need for their own use, and they can then actually use them on phones and the like.
  • everything should be in a single application bundle like a game installer would be. Offer an option to “export my images” to either DICOM or JPG formats when patients need to share images with non-clinicians.