Proximal Design is a strong advocate of the principles behind open source software. Wherever possible, we make an effort to support and contribute to open source development. Further, we seek to apply these principles to the normally closed and proprietary domain of medical device design. Here are a few of the open source applications that we find useful in the pursuit of innovative implant design:

	OsiriX is an advanced DICOM viewer that outperforms most proprietary commercial workstations used in clinics. It creates 3D reconstructions from MR and CT datasets, renders them in real time, and can export to .STL formats for further manipulation in CAD programs. OsiriX makes extensive use of the graphics capabilities built into the OS X operating system, so it is only available for the Macintosh platform.
	Bring out The Gimp! The GNU Image Manipulation Program has just about all of the capabilities of Photoshop, its free, and its available for Windows, Mac, and Linux. One of the most popular open source programs of all time, and for good reason.
	Blender began it's existence as a commercial CGI animation package, and after some business misfortunes was ultimately released to the public domain. It has a complex and sometimes non-intuitive interface, but is extremely powerful. Blender is also a great resource for importing and exporting files in just about any 3D format, and works well for cleaning and smoothing STL geometry from OsiriX.
	Python is a high level programming language that's useful for just about anything.
	A free and open source alternative to the ubiquitous Microsoft Office juggernaut, Open Office has been promoted by Sun and is widely supported by an enthusiastic user and developer community. It works well on any platform, and its easy to open, save, and share files in Microsoft's .DOC, .XLS, and .PPT formats.
	DAKOTA is "a multilevel parallel object-oriented framework for design optimization, parameter estimation, uncertainty quantification, and sensitivity analysis" developed and released by Sandia National Labs. Coupled with a nonlinear finite analysis code such as Abaqus, it works as well for optimizing medical devices as nuclear weapons. If you can figure out how to make it work.
	CentOS is built from the freely available source code for Red Hat Linux. It lacks only the trademarks and price, and with very minor adjustments, applications designed to run on Red Hat (like Abaqus) run perfectly well on CentOS.
	Ubuntu is another flavor of Linux that is distributed free of charge, and also offers the option of commercial support. It is well regarded for its ease of installation and use. The server edition of Ubuntu powers Proximal Design's web, email, and database servers, as well as DARWIN.
	Finally, Joomla is a web content management system that is "flexible, simple, elegant, customizable, and powerful." Joomla was used to build and maintain this web site.

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