Open Source Medical Software
After having spent > 10 years working on clinical medical device software, I'm reaching the conclusion that open source is likely to be a better approach to design control of medical device software than what opaque companies are currently able to achieve.
I think the basic conflict is one between a clear, understandable design and an obfuscated design. Some of the companies that I have worked for clearly have a business incentive to obfuscate aspects of their device's design, which is in conflict with the need of a medical device's design to be readily understandable by engineers who are tasked with modifying the design of the device. I could mention specific examples...
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Why?
More eyeballs = better quality. The quality of some of the software that I have worked on (software that is used in MANY clinics throughout the world) is simply horrendous. Management of the company(s) responsible should really be ashamed of themselves for allowing such terrible quality code out of the door. At least with open source, there would be a humiliation factor at work because everyone can see the state of the code.
More research = better understood
Changes to conform to expectations / understanding of technical clinical users, _not_ filtered through the obfustacting understanding of marketing folks
Design freed from corporate interests is better; propriety data model lock-in is at odds with safe and efficacious defensive design.
Quality of people developing is better - no attempt to hide influences
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ITK / VTK
These are libraries for graphics and image processing, as opposed to applications (though there are a number of applications).
Insight Segmentation
MITG
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Osirix
A Macintosh-based image visualization platform. Haven't used (because I don't have a Mac), but I hear good things.
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Open Source EMR
This is an interesting field, as the possibilities for applying open source to EMR are fairly large.
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