Reading CT scans with eFilmLT.exe on Vista

A bit off-topic but I thought I’d share. A friend of mine had this CT scan on CD and was having trouble reading it on his PC (sometimes it worked, sometimes not). And simply copying it to his hard disk enabled it unreadable. So I offered to debug why, and lo and behold, a quick Google search shows that lots of other people have reported similar problems (e.g., see here).

It seems that this proprietary reader (eFilmLT.exe), made by Merge Software, looks for a valid binary “DICOMDIR” file that points to the metadata for the particular scan images on the CD (e.g., the patient name, date taken, image filenames, etc.). Why this isn’t a human-readable format like XML, I have no idea.

Anyway, if you have a set of images that you can’t read:

  1. copy them to your hard disk
  2. download the attached zipfile, which contains all the relevant reader files (e.g. ,eFilmLT.exe, associated DLLs, “Profiles” directory, and configuration files). All these are (I think) independent of the particular CT scan on a given CD. I have *not* included “DICOMDIR” here by design.
  3. Overwrite your files with the contents of this zipfile.

Then try to launch the new eFilmLT.exe. It should pick up your DICOMDIR and now you can read your CT scans. This has been tested on Vista, probably XP works as well. Good luck.

Download: efilmbinaries.zip

118 comments

  1. I have the new mri cd of my mother’s mri scan but I cannot read them and I have no idea how to do what you have described. Please send me the detailed instructions how to do this on windows xp professional. Greg Watson scenichillsguy@bellsouth.net

  2. THANK YOU! This is the best approach to making this work effectively. Much appreciated Rolf Kaiser!

  3. Man thank you so much. Thanks to you I now have the ability to assess my spine trauma. What a man.

  4. stan, can you answer my question from today on overwriting files? what files? and how is that done. i thought overwriting was essentially editing an existing file, which I certainly don’t want to do to the wrong file. thanks,

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