Watching your own medical CT: Free Software makes it possible

I’ve received my own CT (computer tomography) images on a CD-ROM from the hospital. Unfortunately, they were expecting their patients to run exclusively on Windows (Well, TDK – the manufacturer of the CT did), so it was filled with autorun.inf, .exe and .dll files. *sigh*
Long story short: The actual images were stored as “DICOM” files (a medical image standard, yeah!) – now all I had was to install a viewer.

“apt-cache search dicom” returns a handful of entries, but the most interesting ones for me where:
AMIDE (http://xmedcon.sourceforge.net/)
(X)MedCon (http://amide.sourceforge.net/documentation.html)

With the XMedCon app I could view the DICOM images, and with the medcon commandline tool, I did:
$ medcon -c PNG -f *.dcm
to convert the DICOMs to PNGs. No fuzz.

AMIDE however was really impressing me, because it takes the DICOM images of a CT, reads that they’re linked and renders 3 views, based on the top-only pictures:
top, front and side

I was now able to navigate through my own CT at home, without being forced to use proprietary tools. Great!