Timothy C. Hain, MD

Professor of Neurology, Otolaryngology, and Physical Therapy/Human Movement Science, Northwestern University Medical School, Chicago IL, USA.

EMAIL ADDRESS: t-hain@northwestern.edu

This space holds helpful information about software and hardware and vendors that Dr. Hain has discovered by trial and error. Perhaps if enough of us do this, searches on these devices or companies will bring up more relevant information.

Efilmlite -- and other "lite" radiology viewers -- annoyware ?

1/31/08

Efilmlite is one of several radiology viewer applications that are commonly included when one gets a CD of someones MRI or CT scan for review.

These programs are free to the user (the doctor), and certainly the general rule that "you get what you pay for" applies here.

There are numerous problems !

• Every program has it's own idiosyncratic interface. Imagine -- having to learn a new wordprocessing program every day !
• They slow one down -- you put in the CD, you wait for the "images to load" (while getting a cup of coffee perhaps), then you try to figure out which key makes the thing work.
• When you take out the CD, efilmlite puts up a very stubborn "wrong CD in drive" message. Often I have to reboot my computer to get this annoying error message to go away.
• Often it installs itself onto my computer - -I don't really want more stuff cluttering up my computer.
• Many hospitals seem to put on marketing information on the patient's radiology CD -- I have no interest in reading about how great hospital X might be -- I just want to get down to business and find out if the hospital did a good job, and if their radiologists are any good.

I recently (1/08) had an opportunity to use the "real" efilm - -not the lite version. This is a far better piece of software, and actually very useful. It fixes most of the issues noted above and below. It seems that the viewers that the companies "give away" are (perhaps) annoy-ware.

Please -- someone needs to write a new (lite) program that:

• Presents a consistent user interface -- no matter what scanner was used to obtain the images
• Does things in background -- so that there is no delay
• Shuts down without annoying messages
• Has a reasonable price -- lets say $100/copy.