Supported images and formats
Check input requirements, views and tools for CT, MR and PET.
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CT: classic single-frame and Enhanced CT
Supports classic CT, Enhanced CT and Legacy Converted Enhanced CT. Shared/per-frame metadata supplies geometry, windows and rescale; time points and other dimensions form separate groups. Regular HU grayscale volumes support 2D, Montage, comparison, MPR and 3D. Non-HU/supplemental-color derived images support frame browsing and quantitative measurements, without HU analysis or volume reconstruction. 4D currently uses multiple classic CT phase series.
MR: classic and Enhanced MR
Classic MR Image Storage, Enhanced MR and Legacy Converted Enhanced MR support single-sample MONOCHROME1/MONOCHROME2. Shared/per-frame metadata drives decoding and display groups. Use existing 2D, montage, 2–4-series comparison, MPR and 3D tabs. MR has auto window, source units and basic measurements; CT-specific templates and analysis are hidden.
Important
MR reconstruction and quantitative limits
MPR/3D require one echo, diffusion encoding, time point and component with regular geometry. Missing dimensions are not guessed; localizers, duplicate positions and irregular slices cannot be reconstructed. MR Color, Mosaic, spectroscopy, MR 4D playback and fusion remain unsupported. DWI/ADC may be displayed when their format is supported, without ADC calculation, Real World Value Mapping, vendor-private quantitative scaling, DTI, perfusion or fMRI analysis.
PET: classic static or whole-body PT
Supports classic PET Image Storage, single-frame MONOCHROME2, with SeriesType STATIC / IMAGE or WHOLE BODY / IMAGE. Available views are 2D, Compare 2D, MPR and 3D, plus fusion and fusion 3D for eligible CT / PET pairs. Units depend on metadata; missing required information prevents SUV conversion. PET Montage, 4D, dynamic / gated and Enhanced / multi-frame PET are unsupported.
Color images and other objects
Common RGB, YBR and PALETTE COLOR images support 2D and montage viewing, zoom, pan, rotation, annotations and PNG export. Ordinary color multiframe objects that can be decoded frame by frame support browsing and playback. Source colors are preserved without CT windows, inversion, pseudocolor or scalar HU/SUV/MTF analysis. Physical measurements require valid PixelSpacing; without calibration, millimetre scales and physical measurements are disabled. Ultrasound region-specific calibration is not supported. Color MPR/3D, video codecs, whole-slide pathology and vendor-specific objects are outside this scope. CR, DX, US and XA objects still require format-specific validation; Tag access alone does not imply viewing support.
File formats and pixel decoding
The .dcm extension is optional. ZIP, RAR, 7z and TAR are outer archives containing supported DICOM objects. The application bundles decoders for uncompressed pixels, RLE, JPEG Baseline/Extended (8-bit only)/Lossless, JPEG-LS and JPEG 2000. Viewing, thumbnails and PNG export share the same decoder policy. Missing components, unsupported encodings and decoding failures have distinct messages. Pixel decoding support does not imply support for all multi-frame, color or video objects. NIfTI (.nii / .nii.gz), standalone NRRD images and vendor raw MR data are not supported image inputs. Import NRRD segmentations from the right toolbar in the matching DICOM MPR / 4D tab; export the current phase and segments as NRRD for Slicer.