Alexandra Monteiro1. 1. PhD, Associate Professor, School of Medical Sciences, Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro (UERJ), Rio de Janeiro, RJ, Brazil. E-mail: monteiroamv@gmail.com .
mHealth, or mobile health is a term associated with the daily practice of
medicine and public health supported by mobile devices such as cell phones and tablets. It
is an universal trend of convergence of all patients' information and images, data banks as
source of information, academic social networks, specialized remote support systems and
alike, as a support to the medical practice and to the teaching of medicine. Additionally
there is the possibility of access by patients to their reports, tests results and
schedules. However, other low-cost technologies are available, such as Raspberry Pi, a
credit-card-sized computer developed in the United Kingdom by the Raspberry Pi
Foundation(. Such project was
aimed at facilitating and encouraging the teaching of computer sciences for children in
that country, and involving the study of computer techniques, methods and tools, processes
automation and development of solutions based on the use of digital processing. The success
of this project has motivated the development of other applications, in health inclusive,
also proposing its utilization as a medical DICOM images viewer. The hardware as a whole is
integrated into a single board which may be coupled to a display monitor, but obviously
without meeting the minimum requirements for communication protocols, file or algorithm
format in agreement with the current DICOM and HL standards(. Probably, such a solution may be useful for clinicians to
visualize images, but, strictly speaking, should not be utilized as a working tool for the
radiologist. The present issue of Radiologia Brasileira introduces the theme
"Raspberry Pi: a 35-dollar device for viewing DICOM images"(. Therefore, this is a worthwhile opportunity to reflect on
the theme.