NVDA and an OCR of PIF

[David Grossoehme]

Good Afternoon:  This question has been answered on the other NVDA.  The
question is will a PIF formatted file from an Xray or MRI be readable by
the OCR Add On for NVDA?  I have one of the programmers from the
American Council of the Blind here in the U.S. questioning me on this,
so, I need as clear of an answer as I can get to clarify this with
them.  In my mind I can not see how this is possible.  I have this in
question beings I'm dealing with trying to get a hospital here that
deals with 8 different states and has thousands of medical offices and
hospitals.  They have a Portal that has the personal files on it where
you can look at your records and the images are being read to me as
(slide 1, slide 2, etc.)  Can someone help to try and find an answer for
this information?

Dave

[Rui Fontes]

Hello!

Are you sure of the PIF extension?

Best regards,

Rui Fontes
NVDA portuguese team

[Quentin Christensen]

Do you perhaps mean "PDF"?  Or if it is an image, common formats include JPG, GIF, PNG, TIFF.

In all cases, if you open the file, you can use NVDA's OCR on it.  I THINK Windows photo viewer can open most of those though I must admit I haven't got all them handy to test.  Note that NVDA's OCR function can only recognise text in what is visible on screen.  If something is zoomed in too much, you won't get much text.  But if it is zoomed out too far, it also won't be able to recognise text (yes you may be able to zoom your PDF out to see all 50 pages on screen at once, but in that case it only gives an idea of the "shape" and colour of text and images on each page).

There are several other add-ons which can use different engines for OCR, and several which can give you a description of images.

Kind regards

Quentin

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NV Access

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[David Griffith]

I suspect he means tiff, as this was a popular multi-page scan format in the past. On Windows the old Office Tools Image and Document Scanning Tool produced multi page tiff files which could then be run through OCR to convert into Word Documents.

I searched on my PC for Tiff image files, but, unfortunately, I think all of them were pure graphics files with no text content. The NVDA Advanced OCR addon did attempt to process the files, however, suggesting that if there had been some text to find it might have converted it.

As the addon is donation based and free to try I suggest that he simply installs it and gives it a go.

 I think it is currently formally incompatible but still works fine here with NVDA 2025 and apparently beta 2026.

David Griffith

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From: Quentin Christensen <que...@nvaccess.org>
: Sunday, February 22, 2026 11:04 PM
To: nvda-...@nvaccess.org <nvda-...@nvaccess.org>
Subject: Re: [NVDA] NVDA and an OCR of PIF

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/a/nvaccess.org/d/msgid/nvda-users/CAKsDpFiNofCNhe_iNLHqKDG7oPw96m154PUghMpnd14yMrcG5w%40mail.gmail.com.

[Sheik Habeebul Haq]

PIF = Portable Image format:

https://github.com/gfcwfzkm/PIF-Image-Format

not sure but whether it is used for medical imaging 

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Regards
Habeeb

[Sheik Habeebul Haq]

my previous link to PIF image format is not suitable for medical imaging as it is designed for low resource embedded systems.
I think reference is made to MrSID Portable Image Format (PIF): A highly compressed, wavelet-based image format. MrSID stands for Multiresolution Seamless Image Database.In clinical Medical Imaging and Teleradiology, the MrSID PIF format is utilized in clinical networks for managing and transmitting massive diagnostic files like high-resolution X-rays, MRIs, and CT scans.
Why it is used:
Multiresolution Viewing: It allows a medical professional to open a massive scan and initially only load a lightweight overview of the entire image.
Bandwidth Efficiency: If a radiologist is working remotely, they can zoom in on a specific region of interest (like a specific nodule on a lung scan). The PIF format dynamically fetches the high-resolution data only for that exact zoomed-in area. This drastically reduces the time and bandwidth required to transmit large medical files over wide-area networks.
Diagnostic Integrity: It allows precise control over the compression ratio to ensure no critical diagnostic data is lost or distorted, aligning with industry protocols like the DICOM (Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine) standard. if this is the case, OCR cannot help as there is no text to recognize in those files.

The Purdue Image Format (.pif) is utilized in laboratory research, specifically for Cryo-Electron Microscopy (Cryo-EM) and single-particle image processing which might be not relevant here.

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Regards
Habeeb