Horos

Horos is a term with several uses, spanning linguistics and technology.

In ancient Greek, horos (ὁρός) means boundary or limit. It referred to a marker or line that defined property borders or territorial extents. In surveying and legal contexts, horoi (the plural) were used to establish and record boundaries. The concept has influenced various boundary-related terms in English and other languages.

In modern technology, Horos is the name of a free, open-source medical image viewer for macOS. It originated as a fork of the commercial OsiriX application and was developed by the Horos Project. Horos provides tools for viewing and analyzing medical images in DICOM format, including two-dimensional viewing, multiplanar reconstructions, and volume rendering, along with basic image processing capabilities. The project emphasizes accessibility on the Mac platform and distributes the software under an open-source license, allowing clinicians, researchers, and educators to use and modify it.

As with any medical imaging software, users should verify compatibility with their DICOM datasets, operating system version, and hardware, and consult official documentation for current features and supported formats. Horos represents one option among several open-source and commercial viewers used in radiology, medical research, and teaching.