Friday 16 May 2008

Flash Player & Radiology

I was surfing digg during a quiet patch and saw that there is a new release of Adobe Flash Player.
It is still currently in demo format, but it looks promising. The new version (Version 10) has native 3D support and is cross platform as per normal. The implications of these new features are pretty profound to radiology.
Imagine if you could do 3D reconstructions via your browser on any platform (Windows, Linux, MAC, ...). There would be no need for an ActiveX control as seems to be the norm in most PACS systems that I have seen therefore no more Windows!
This potentially means that in the future any computer with enough processing and graphics power will have the ability to be a full multi modality workstation with full 3D reconstruction.
I hope the developers out there are coding like mad making some new flash radiology applications for us to play with.
I think I am going to take a crash course in flash over the next few weeks. I haven't played with action script since Flash MX2004.

You can see a basic demo of the new features in Adobe Flash here: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/demos/