Your Scans Were Never Meant for You

In 2011, I crashed my bike and ended up in the hospital with broken ribs. They did a chest CT. When I was discharged, someone handed me a CD-ROM with my scan on it.

I took it home and tried to open it. The disc had a proprietary viewer that didn't run on my Mac. So I searched for software that could open a DICOM file. The only option I found for macOS was OsiriX — a viewer built for radiologists.

It took me an hour to get it installed and figure out the interface. Every menu, every label, every tool assumed I had years of medical training. The jargon was impenetrable. The interface was hostile. Nothing about the experience was designed for someone like me — a patient who just wanted to see his own scan.

But I kept going. And eventually I managed to create a 3D volume rendering of my chest. I could see my lungs. I could see my broken ribs — the exact fractures that had been causing all my pain. For the first time, I understood what was happening inside my own body. Not because a doctor explained it. Because I could see it.

That moment was extraordinary. But it only happened because I was stubborn enough to fight through software that was never designed for me.

The real problem

That is the real problem. Not CDs. Not file formats. The problem is that every piece of medical imaging software ever built has been designed for doctors.

OsiriX is for radiologists. Horos is for radiologists. 3D Slicer is for researchers. RadiAnt is for clinicians. The software that runs on hospital workstations is for technologists and physicians. Even the patient portals that hospitals have started offering — the ones that let you “view your images” — just show you flat, grayscale slices with no explanation of what you are looking at.

None of it is for you.

This is not an accident. Medical imaging has always been treated as a professional tool. Scans are acquired by technologists, read by radiologists, and discussed between doctors. The patient — the person whose body is actually in the scan — has never been part of that workflow. You are the subject of the image, but you are not the audience for it.

What this means for patients

The result is that millions of people every year get CT and MRI scans and have no meaningful way to see what is in them. You get a radiology report written in language designed for other doctors. You might get a CD you cannot open. If you are lucky, your patient portal shows you some flat images you cannot interpret. And then you go home and search the internet for your results, trying to figure out what “hypodense lesion” means.

Your scans contain a detailed, three-dimensional picture of the inside of your body. They are some of the most personal data you will ever generate. And you have almost no way to actually look at them.

Why I built KAYMO

I have been on the patient side of this problem for fifteen years. Every time, the same experience: scans taken, reports delivered, and me on the outside, trying to piece together what was happening in my own body with tools that were never built for me.

KAYMO exists because that 3D rendering I wrestled out of OsiriX in 2011 should not have been that hard. The moment of seeing my broken ribs, understanding my own pain — that should be the default experience for every patient, not a reward for an hour of fighting with radiology software.

When you upload a scan to KAYMO, you see your body in 3D. AI-guided tours walk you through your anatomy in plain language. You can ask questions and get answers you actually understand.

Your scans were never meant for you. KAYMO is.