On March 27, Adobe Systems Inc, San Jose, Calif, began shipping the latest version of its popular Photoshop image-manipulation software—Photoshop CS3 Extended. Photoshop CS3 E contains a variety of new capabilities, including tools designed to meet the needs of medical imaging professionals.

“There is now the capability, in Photoshop CS3, to bring in DICOM images,” explained Joseph Bailey, MD, of Montgomery Radiology Associates in Alabama. “That has never been available before, so the only option for anybody who works with radiographic images was to essentially take the JPEG images they got from the proprietary imaging software and work with them. Now we have a significant increase in the quality of published images.”

Bailey said that as a teaching aid, CS3 E is without peer in the world of image-manipulation software. “You now have the ability to use layers, so when you’re creating lectures, and you want to speak to medical students today, to residents tomorrow, and at a national meeting in a week, you don’t have to change your images,” he said. “You can just change the layered labels on your images to fit each particular audience.”

Portability is another major advantage of the software, which runs on any PC or Mac. “Before, any time you wanted to work with your images, you were stuck at a PACS workstation or your EMR,” Bailey noted. “Now you can get the images onto your laptop and take them with you. I think that’s going to be really attractive to a lot of teaching professionals, because if you can get your high-bit images into Photoshop as high-bit images, you can work from a lot of different places.”

Exclusive tools are a boon to any imaging professional. One area where workstations are lacking, Bailey says, is Hunter and Driffield curve control. “In the proprietary imaging software, you can control window and levels, but you can’t really control the curves, and everybody who goes through the radiology physics class knows that these control how much highlight and how much shadow detail you can see. You can control that in Photoshop.” Other tools include the ability to crop and label animation, and color assignment for accurate conversion from full-color images to grayscale.

All of which adds up to the ability to render images for a wide variety of purposes—from screen projection in a hotel ballroom to use on a project’s Web site to publication in a journal. “People are used to being told, ‘Here’s the JPEG, we’ll send it in,’ and then when they get the journal, they say, ‘Well, you can’t really see what it is I was trying to show,’ ” Bailey said. “There’s such a level of expectation in the radiology world that when you publish a radiograph, it just won’t show what you want it to show. That whole perception is about to change.”

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