kradview

Nowadays, all the image capturing devices for medical purposes use the same image format: DICOM. DICOM stands for Digital Imaging and COmmunications in Medicine; and it is a very rich image format, independent from the capturing device and the visualization platform. Now DICOM is considered the worldwide standard for Industry and research. The format is open, and the most of its information can be freely download. Anyway, part of the standard can only be obtained paying a fee. This makes harder a free implementation, but does not affect to its openness.
From its richness and platform independence comes its main problem. DICOM is a hard format to implement, so far it can store rich information about the patient, the capture device, the physical parameters of the capturing process and several images in only one file. It also allows that each field can have its own codification format, length and endianness. A field can be in little endian or big endian, and it is up to the viewer to identify it from the control fields and to make the right conversions. The image is codified in JPEG lossless format.
There are several ways to open a DICOM image on a free operating system. The most of them are proprietary solutions; and the free ones are really hard to use for medical staff on a daily basics, and does not show the metadata of the image, what is really important for daily work. A doctor needs a way to see clearly, fast, accurattely a X-ray image.
Here is the gap that kradview fills: Kradview is a GPLed viewer of images obtained for some different sources: X-ray, NMR and DICOM-compatible imaging devices that runs on free operating systems. Its aim is a easy to use DICOM viewer with instant rendering of images, no matter the size and the zoom of the DICOM image. It covers the "let's see the the X-ray image" need of the medical professional.
Kradview as been developed in C and C++ using KDE libraries. The parsing, rendering, and processing routines has been developed in C, and the graphical interface has been developed in C++ and includes the former routines with "extern C" for fast use.
Now kradview counts with thousands of downloads, and it is being used succesfully to see radiological images and its metadata on several medical centers.

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Note: the images shown have lost quality due to the compresion and the image restriction limits.

Do not use the download link of below due to unknown reasons, it download a 738596 wrong file that can't be untarred. Use the home page of kradview to download, whose link is above.

Kradview Changelog v.1.1.0 12/04/2008
* Crashing on unsuported/non-DICOM files fixed (David del Rio Medina)
* gcc 4.3 issue fixed (Stefan Husmann)
* Code cleanups (David Santo Orcero)

Kradview Changelog v.1.0.0 12/04/2008
* Improve the dicom render engine (David del Rio Medina)
* Make "wrong version of automake" problem fail verbosely (Andrey Yurkovsky)

Kradview Changelog v.0.6.2 - 8/7/2007
Several Bugfixes (David Santo Orcero)
Licence changed to GPLv3 (David Santo Orcero)

Kradview Changelog v.0.6.1 - 21/3/2006
Minor code cleanups (David Santo Orcero)

Kradview Changelog v.0.6.0 - 18/3/2006

kradview now compiles for any gcc version (David Santo Orcero)
Fixed error on read width from a file: now kradview open lots of more images (David Santo Orcero)

Kradview Changelog v.0.5.3-6/9/2005

Fixed core dump when asking for information of a image and there was no image loaded. (David Santo Orcero)

Kradview Changelog v.0.5.3 - 7/6/2005

First free version of kradview. (David Santo Orcero)