Viewing and manipulating medical/dental images such as CBCT, CT or MRI scans on your computer or tablet may be useful, but limited by licensing or incompatible operating systems. Many free DICOM* viewers operate on Windows and MacOS, but which viewer to choose can be challenging.

Listed below are the viewers that I recommend, but please be sure to download the correct version for your operating system and  if 32-bit or 64-bit architecture; most new computers use 64-bit architecture.

Recommended DICOM image viewers:

1. Windows: MicroDicom is a free, lightweight DICOM viewer for personal use. It features an intuitive user interface, fast performance and MPR features. It can open JPEG, BMP, PNG GDIF and TIFF formats. It also has a CD/DVD/USB version that can be added to DICOM dataset for use on exernal storage.

2. MacOS: Horos, a fee 64-bit, open source medical image viewer.  A discussion and more information can be viewed on YouTube.

Useful free segmentation software, valuable in understanding the volume and surface areas of various features, such as apical periodonititis:

1.  ITK-SNAP is a free open source software application created at the University of Pennsylvania and funded by an NIH grant. It allows the user to manually and seimi-automatically delineate anatomical regions of interest, also called image segmentation. This software is not for clinical use. More information on YouTube.

2.  3D Slicer (Kitware) is a free open source software funded by the NIH for visualization and semi-automatic and fully automatic image segmentation of medical, biomedical and a variety of 3D images and meshes. This software is not for clinical use. More on YouTube

3. VolView (Kitware) is a free open-source clinical radiological viewer that runs on your web browser and provide photo-realistic, interactive, 3D visualizations using cinematic volume rendering. This software does not upload your data and works without downloading the program.

4. MIPAV is a free DICOM viewer, editor and anonymizer for reseach only: Medical Image Processing, Analysis and Visualization (MIPAV), NIH
Link to using  MIPAV Anonymize

*DICOM (Digital Imaging and COmmunications in Medicine) is an international standard file format and network communications protocol developed by the American College of Radiology (ACR) specifically for medical imaging.