Open Source in Medicine

Such software projects range from computerizing patients’ medical records, medical history databases and training simulators to image viewers and analyzers

Tuesday, November 05, 2002

The OSHCA (Open Source Health Care Alliance) is an alliance that promotes open source in medical software.

Bioinformatics.org is another non-profit organization that hosts open-source medical software for bioinformatics. It not only provides programs written in Perl and Java for the Unix platform but also on C++ in Windows. AliBio, one such software, is an algorithm library for bioinformatics. You can find out more at http://bioinformatics.-org/search/fullprojectlist.php

The Open Bioinformatics Foundation (http://open-bio.-org/) is a non-profit, umbrella group for various Open Bio sites. The foundation was formed when the BioPerl project became too big to be centrally administered. It provides financial, administrative and technical assistance to the various open-source projects, but does not participate directly in the development of open-source work. Organized in 1995, The BioPerl Project is an organization of Perl developers carrying out projects in bioinformatics, genomics and life-science research. Their home page (bioperl.org) not only has the latest downloads of ‘bioperl’ tools, but also a tutorial. The source can be obtained from ftp://bio.perl.org/pub/SRC/
Other Open Bio sites include biojava.org, bioperl.org, biopython.org, bioxml.org, biodas.org and biocorba.org. These provide software, libraries and tutorials.

COSMOS (Common Open Source Medical Objects) is a repository of reusable objects that can be used in medical systems. These reusable objects are available in their source code. You can download the latest collection of all components from http://so-urceforge.net/projects/cosmos/

Other projects include Xmedcon (a medical image-conversion utility), OpenEMed (a medical-information system), ezDICOM (a medical viewer for MRI, CT and ultrasound images), ImLib3D (a C++ library and visualization system for 3D-image processing) and many more. More information on these can be found at http://so-urceforge.net/

Varun Sharma

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