By Graham K. Rogers

One of the apps that I found quite early on for the iPhone was Mobile MIM. Developed by MIMVista, the app displayed medical images from sources like CRT scans. It disappeared from the local App Store and when I checked with the developers, I was told that it was because of local rules with the Thai equivalent of the FDA. Now a new and improved app has appeared.

Mobile MIM did return briefly and I still have it in my iTunes app collection. However, the company has now been renamed MIM Software and they have released an app called VueMe which seems to do the same thing. The iTunes store display for this app seems to show the same images as before.

VueMe

While information in VueMe is clear that this is not intended for diagnosis, it would at least help a doctor who was away from a hospital - for example on vacation - have an idea of a patient's problems before examining the real scans. The app does state (perhaps to be safe) that the app is intended to be used by patients for the non-diagnostic viewing of medical images. However, there is a cloud account login for medical personnel (see below).

A side panel on the iPad lists a number of options where images can be stored: MIMcloud, My Images, Breeze (see below), and Sample Images. The MIMCloud option requires an account to be set up. Apart from the sharing option (Breeze) this is the only way for images to be downloaded to the device.

Signing up for an account was not easy and I could not find a way to do this from the app. Creating an account for cloud access was also not easy to find on the website, but I did manage to track this down eventually. Pricing for medical personnel is shown as "$2 per study [which] covers uploading, viewing, and 90 days of storage." For patients, it was "Free uploading and viewing, plus 90 days of online storage."

Breeze is a service for sharing medical imagery with others. It uses Bluetooth or WiFi for images that are accessible on the app. There were 7 sample images: more than had been with the earlier app. These are downloaded as required, rather than being installed along with the app.

Breeze was easy to use once I had downloaded one of the sample images on the iPhone. I selected an image and entered my name. A security number was generated. This same number had to be entered by the person receiving and the transfer started. The image then appeared in the My Images section on the iPad. I used the left knee, an MR scan with a file size of 4.07 MB. I was familiar with this image as the same one had been used with the earlier app.

Below the image types list in the menu were a number of other items: Welcome (accessing images and Medical images, a User Guide (Intended Use, Basic Image Manipulation, Tools and Security), FAQ, and Support (telephone and email links). The last two items in the list are General Settings and About VueMe. On the iPhone, the extra items are accessed via tool icons at the bottom of the main page.

Images

Other tools available include those for changing the view angle, and for annotation and measurement. Not all tools are available for every image: for example, I there were no view options for the ultrasound image, nor was I able to change the display colour for this.

Although it seems more logical to use the app in portrait mode, on the iPhone the landscape display allowed certain images to have all views displayed simultaneously when available. In landscape mode, the ultrasound image was displayed larger. On the iPad, the images displayed either in portrait or landscape mode. In landscape mode, there was no toolbar on the iPhone, but on the iPad the toolbar is displayed, but can be hidden using a control on the left side.

Comments

While I prefer using the iPhone on a day to day basis, this app is even better on the iPad (which did not exist when its predecessor first arrived). Apart from the different menu displays that the medium allows, the app operates in the same way on both devices, but the larger screen of the iPad makes the image display far easier to work with, and perhaps spot potential problems.

Security for creating the cloud account - and when transferring images between devices - is high. My first attempt at registration failed because the password was deemed to be too weak. Entering a stronger password fixed that. The one-time, 5-digit code used when transferring images from device to device is also indicative of security concerns.

My only criticism of VueMe and related technology is the difficulty not just of creating a cloud account, but finding a means by which this could be done. I looked hard on both the iOS devices and the website before I was able to find a way to create an account. Once done, logging in on a device was easy.

This is one of hundreds of apps that are now displayed in a separate medical section in the iTunes App Store. This is likely to increase even more in the next year or so, particularly as this region expands its medical services.

Graham K. Rogers teaches at the Faculty of Engineering, Mahidol University in Thailand where he is also Assistant Dean. He wrote in the Bangkok Post, Database supplement on IT subjects. For the last seven years of Database he wrote a column on Apple and Macs.