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"The iPod is not just for music any more. Radiologists from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and their colleagues at other institutions from as far away as Europe and Australia are now using iPod devices to store medical images.

Dr. Ratib and Antoine Rosset, M.D., a radiologist in Geneva, Switzerland, recently developed OsiriX, Macintosh-based software for display and manipulation of complex medical image data.

How did the developers go from a music player to a medical storage device? "We basically wanted something that everybody could use," explains Dr. Ratib. "That's why OsiriX can be used with the iPod, iChat and other tools."

Dr. Rosset set up the OsiriX software to automatically recognize and search for medical images on the iPod. When it detects the images, they automatically appear on the list of image data available—similar to the way music files are accessible by the iTune music application.

"It's easy to use and you don't have to worry about how to load and unload it from the iPod," Dr. Ratib says. "But the real beauty of it is that I can use the images directly on the iPod. I don't have to take the time to copy them to my computer. The iPod allows me to copy data from work to my laptop, but I don't have to do it if I don't want to." [Via RSNA]