LETTER TO THE EDITOR Usefulness of the Portable DICOM Viewer System for Facial Bone Fractures

Dear Sir, It is widely recognized that 3-dimensional computed tomography (3D-CT) is useful for diagnosing facial bone fractures.1 However, it can be sometimes difficult to obtain such specialized 3D-CT images from radiologists because of the unusual and specific nature of the request. Moreover, it sometimes takes a long time before the 3D photographs are received. Consequently, we have developed a system by which plastic surgeons themselves can immediately and precisely determine the details of a facial fracture. This system involves the use of a personal laptop computer on which a Digital Imaging and Communications (DICOM) viewer has been preinstalled. This viewer is used as follows. When a patient with suspected facial bone fractures comes to the emergency outpatient clinic, the “volumetric data” of the fractures are captured by the multidetector-row CT with either 8-, 16-, 32-, 64-, or 256-row scanners. The CT images can be reconstructed with the maximum intensity projection and the volume rendering technique. This reconstructed DICOM data can then be analyzed by the plastic surgeon by using the software “OsiriX” (http://www.osirix-viewer.com/), which will work on a personal laptop computer. The author employs a Macintosh OS X for this purpose. There are several advantages of using this portable DICOM viewer system, which are listed as follows: