The Mac Experience in Business & Home: Help, Tips, Discussion & Radio Show Notes

At last I met the new Apple Xserve, at the Radiological Society of North America’s annual conference in Chicago last week, where Apple showed up with a team of knowledgeable specialists, 2×24″ iMacs, and a posse of MacPros running a variety of relevant software. Not only is there art and science in the new Macs, but also Apple is into Science, calling OS X “The Platform for Discovery.” Movies and pics of what was discovered follow. Come, visit the Apple booth at RSNA with me!

My parents watched the kids, (this week I had a customer tell me she thought it is charming I admitted to dropping balls due to having the new baby, that the dads she knows in Silicon Valley would not spend enough time with a new baby to allow that to happen… I was both flattered and somewhat terrified by the prospect of living up to a West-coast work-ethic when working through the weekend is still not enough… and I think she has the luxury to think it’s charming because I haven’t dropped any of her balls, *yet*), allowing me to spend Sunday at McCormick Place , not only taking movies of the Science-oriented solution providers introducing their wares (shown here), but also marveling at the gadgetry assembled to peer inside the human body, store the images and analyze the findings. Oh yes, and help radiologists bill for these services, too!

Pictures - Apple’s presence at RSNA
Nice stack of Xserves!

Take a closer look…

The first and the third are Intel! 4 rows of lights for 4 processors…

Here’s one side of the Apple booth…

A closer look at the 24″ iMac, with the row of MacPros behind it…

And the other side of the booth, more Bio-imaging solutions!

Movies - it’s like you’re really at RSNA with me! Click on pictures to view video:

Glen Lehmann of Atamai Technologies delivered a compelling demonstration of his solution for surgical visualization. His stereoscopic scanner watches the real movements of his hand as he points to various parts of a “patient’s” brain, and the software renders the activity on the computer screen in real time.

Pierre Lemire, President and COO of Calgary Scientific Medical Group, was kind enough to permit this quick interview. They have just received FDA approval, and are enthused about the prospects for their innovative 3d visualization solution.

Brent Reed, Director of Software Development, did a great job providing an overview of his company’s solution, an impressive Picture Archiving & Communications System (PACS) providing web access to medical images. Visit Heart Imaging Technologies for more info.

Phillip Jackson, President and CEO of SecureRad (”Brilliance in Radiology”), took a moment from demonstrating his new solution to talk with us. His open source-based solution combines various tools, including Apache, MySQL, Osirix and PHP, to deliver a web-based, end-to-end solution for radiologists.

Christof Reinhart, President and CEO of Volume Graphics, gives an thorough overview of his upcoming imaging solution. This is a company that seems to be a leader in industrial, volume-based, industrial computer-tomography that is applying its expertise to the medical/life-sciences area, with promising results.

It took me all week to get this blog up, not only was it another ball dropped, but also I had to learn something to do it. This was my first time exporting and uploading movies taken from my digital camera (now 2 years old… and therefore ancient!), and I had expected to use QuickTime Pro to prepare the movies for display here. QuickTime Pro had other ideas. I think because of how the audio is encoded into the movies, every effort I made to export the movies in a more compressed, lower resolution for better viewing on the web resulted in no audio. Not a problem for Buster Keaton, not good for a bunch of talking heads. I expected iMovie to have the same issues, given it relies on QuickTime for its import/export, so I went to the web and found an excellent piece of software called MPEG Streamclip, made by Squared 5 free video solutions for Mac and Windows, with which I had great fun experimenting to get files under 2MB. Next time I may try uploading to YouTube!

If you liked this blog entry, you may also like this one:

Apple at NeuroScience 2006.

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 2nd, 2006 at 11:59 pm and is filed under Apple/Mac, Chicago, News, Opinions, Review, Science. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.