 And what's up in this video, I'm going to show you how to read digital x-rays on your Mac Dr. Nathan Cashin of exploring chiropractic here. Every now and then there's a discussion in the Facebook groups or online forums where someone starts talking about using a Mac in chiropractic practice. And there's lots of recommendations getting you know the newest and the greatest computers or laptops or iPads. But invariably at some point someone will say yeah Macs are great but you're going to have to keep a PC around to open x-rays any digital imaging that you might get from a imaging center. This is something that kind of confuses me and also just annoys me because I cannot suffer the injustice of anyone thinking that a Mac and Dodge is in any way inferior to a PC. The fact is you can open die-com images all of those images whether x-ray MRI CAT scans that come from an imaging center on a Mac and it's free. So I'm going to show you how to do that. To do so I have a disk of images. This happens to be an MRI that my dad got and shared with me so no patient information being shared here. But all I have to do is take that image from an imaging center right medical radiologist and if I were to open this up on a PC there's an auto run application that's Windows only but I'm not going to use it right. I'm going to use Mac software to open the images on this file. So let's pop in the disk. You do have to have a disk drive so you can grab a superdrive like this or a third-party brand DVD CD ROM reader writer. I'm going to pop it into my computer. It'll pop up like any regular disk and you'll see the auto run the EXE which is a Windows executable that will not run on a Mac. But the thing is you don't want to use their software. You want to use the same software every time and go ask Jeff Langmay at the evidence-based chiropractor. He has a great video that I'll post in the comments below on why you should be using the same software every time. But if we just go through the file folders here you'll see some empty folders. You'll see results. You'll see some text to read me. But what we're looking for is a folder that has DICOM images and these are not going to be readable just by the computer. But once we go in to a DICOM viewer then we'll be able to open these images. So what is a DICOM viewer? Well DICOM's digital imaging communications in medicine and this is the standard for any type of medical imaging whether it's plain film x-ray whether it's MRI, CAT scan, ultrasound and there are a number of DICOM viewers for the Mac. The most widely known is probably OSIRIX. This is a very powerful and probably the most popular DICOM viewer for Mac. It is made for medical radiologists. It is a little bit expensive for the day-to-day practice of a chiropractor but there is a free version that you can download and that's probably going to be as much as you need. There's also a well-known app called the Horos project and this is free to download however they are asking for donations and they do push that pretty hard so you can say yeah I've donated or no I don't want to donate and then you do have to give your email address and then you can download that. And then my preferred one currently is one called Miel LXIV. The secret here is that these are all in essence the same application. They're built on open source code meaning it's code that anybody can download and it's free to use except they add on some features and functionality on top of it. The reason I choose Miel for myself is because this one is available in the Mac App Store so if I get a new computer I can just go to my purchases and download it automatically. But I probably would recommend Horos or Osiris. Osiris has an iPad version also has some great packs system that you can subscribe to so you can store these images on the cloud. Probably again as a chiropractor seeing patients and just reading their images you probably don't need that unless you want to store all of your patients images on the cloud. So I'm just going to go ahead and I'm going to use Miel so I'm going to open it up here and you'll see that I have a previous image another MRI from my dad from almost 10 years ago but what I want to do is I've already put the CD or the DVD into the drive and I just want to import and then I'm going to choose that disk. It's automatically going to open it up. I'm just going to say open and see what happens. I want to go ahead and copy the files into the database and we're just going to give it a minute to ingest these files and there we go. It's pulled in the images from this disk and you can see they're starting to populate one by one so it does take just a little bit to download all of the files from this disk. All right there we have it. It's imported into my database. You can see the different files here you know as I get some previews so I'm just going to open one up so you get an idea of what you can see you can scan through it the different levels it's going to rotate through all the images and you can click and drag to adjust the contrast if you want to adjust how you see it and I'm not going to go through the whole process of viewing this because again Jeff Langman at the evidence base chiropractor has a great video tutorial where he goes through the four key elements of imaging that you want to have and that you want to nail down as you're reviewing images but I do want to point out that from here there are a number of different things I can do let's say I want to send this study off to a DAC bar to get an expert read I can simply export this to wherever I want to save it just in a folder on my desktop and then whether it's sending it to Matt Skalski via google drive or even emailing it if that's something you're comfortable with you can just send those files off you can almost also burn them to your own disk if you want your patients to have a copy and that's about it really simple to open imaging files on a mac you don't need to use the built-in software on the zd you don't need to keep a windows pc in your office just for reading radiology files