Drop any dental file — we work out what it is and open it
Dental practices produce two kinds of file. Anything that uses radiation — an intraoral sensor, a panoramic or cephalometric unit, a cone beam scanner — writes DICOM. Anything optical, such as an intraoral scanner, writes a 3D mesh: STL, PLY, OBJ or glTF. Extensions are unreliable, so a dental file is best identified by its first bytes.
This page has no upload endpoint. Files are read from your own disk by the browser, archives are expanded in this tab, and the parsers are fetched only once you actually open something.
Keep every scan on the patient record
DodoDentist stores radiographs, cone beam studies and intraoral scans against the patient and the tooth, beside charting, treatment planning, reminders and billing — so the next person who needs the file does not have to work out what it is.
Try DodoDentist freeTwo kinds of machine sit in a dental practice, and they produce two kinds of file. Anything that involves radiation — an intraoral sensor, a phosphor plate scanner, a panoramic or cephalometric arm, a cone beam scanner — writes DICOM. Anything optical — an intraoral scanner, a desktop model scanner, a face scanner — writes a 3D surface mesh: STL, PLY, OBJ or glTF. Almost every file a colleague, a laboratory or a radiology centre sends you is one of those two things, and knowing which one you are holding answers most of the question on its own.
The rule is easy. The filename is not. 3Shape names its own mesh case files .dcm, which is also the DICOM extension, so an intraoral scan can arrive wearing a radiograph name. Cone beam exporters routinely write their slices with no extension at all. Vendors wrap a study in an extension only they have heard of. That is why this page reads the first bytes of a file before it looks at the name, and then tells you which of the two it trusted.
An intraoral sensor or a phosphor plate scanner writes a single-frame DICOM image: a periapical or a bitewing. A panoramic unit writes one wide DICOM covering both arches, the joints and the sinuses. A cephalometric arm writes the side-of-skull DICOM that orthodontics is planned from. All three are one file and one image, and they open here with window, level and invert controls. Many practices also export the same radiograph as a JPEG or a TIFF in order to email it — that copy is only the picture, without the acquisition data or the pixel spacing that makes a measurement in millimetres possible.
An intraoral scanner is not an X-ray device and never produces one. It captures the surface of the arches and writes a mesh, most often STL, because STL is what printers and mills consume. A cone beam unit is the awkward case: it produces DICOM like every other X-ray device, but as hundreds or thousands of slices that are one acquisition rather than one image.
STL cannot carry colour. Not "usually does not" — the format has no field for it, which is why an STL opens as a plaster-coloured model no matter what the scanner showed on its own screen. If the colour matters, export as PLY, which stores a colour for every vertex, or as OBJ, which references a separate material file and its texture image, or as GLB, which packs the texture inside the single file. The table below marks which formats can carry colour at all, read straight from the same registry this page identifies files with.
A cone beam export is a folder of single-frame DICOM slices — a Carestream CS 8200 3D volume is 651 of them — usually zipped, sometimes with a Windows viewer bundled alongside. Open one slice on its own and you see one thin cross-section. This page treats two or more DICOM files arriving together as one stack and scrolls through them, decoding a slice at a time rather than holding the volume in memory: decoded in full, that CS 8200 stack is around 800 MB, which no browser tab will hold. What it does not do is reconstruct the volume. There is no multiplanar reformat and no 3D rendering here, because both need the whole stack resident at once.
A dental unit rarely hands you a file. It hands you a bundle: the image plus whatever the vendor workstation needs to redraw it the way the operator last saw it, under an extension only that vendor has ever used. Most of those bundles are renamed ZIP archives, and this page opens them by expanding the archive in your browser and then opening what it finds inside. A Carestream .tw, for example, holds a lateral cephalogram as DICOM alongside a few XML sidecars and a thumbnail image — the cephalogram is the thing that opens.
A few are not archives at all. Medit .meditMesh is a closed format with no public specification; when a Medit case also contains a PLY, that PLY is the file to open. The second table lists every wrapper this page knows by name, which vendor writes it, and whether the entry was confirmed against a real clinical file or written from the vendor documentation — a distinction worth keeping visible, because one of those two is evidence and the other is a reasonable expectation.
Honesty is cheaper than a spinner that never stops. 7-Zip, RAR, TAR and gzip archives are recognised and named but not expanded, so re-export the study as a ZIP or a plain folder. A password-protected ZIP stops at the password. DICOM files whose pixel data is JPEG 2000, JPEG-LS or RLE are identified and their encoding is named, but not decoded; uncompressed DICOM and the two lossless-JPEG variants cone beam units write are decoded. PDF reports are named rather than drawn. TIFF depends on the browser, since some draw it and most do not. In every one of those cases the file is still named correctly, which is usually the answer you came for.
There is no upload endpoint on this page. The file is read by your browser, from your own disk, and the parsers are fetched only when you actually open something. That matters more here than for a general file tool, because a DICOM header normally carries the patient name, identifier and date of birth beside the image, and none of it appears in the picture. A radiograph that looks anonymous on screen still names the patient to anyone who opens the file, so strip those fields before a study leaves the practice.
This page opens all of them, and it exists for the case where you do not yet know what you are holding. Once you do, each format has a page of its own that goes further into what that format stores, which devices write it and what it cannot carry.
| Format | Extensions | Written by | What it holds | Can carry colour | Opens on this page |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| DICOM | .dcm .dic .dicom .ima | Intraoral sensors, phosphor plate scanners, panoramic and cephalometric units, cone beam scanners | One 2D picture | Yes | Yes, with window and level — several slices scroll as a stack |
| JPEG | .jpg .jpeg .jpe | Cameras, and imaging software exporting a radiograph to send | One 2D picture | Yes | Yes, as a picture |
| PNG | .png | Screenshots and software exports | One 2D picture | Yes | Yes, as a picture |
| TIFF | .tif .tiff | Imaging software exports and document scanners | One 2D picture | Yes | Only where the browser itself draws TIFF |
| Bitmap | .bmp | Older Windows imaging software | One 2D picture | Yes | Yes, as a picture |
| WebP | .webp | Web exports and practice websites | One 2D picture | Yes | Yes, as a picture |
| STL (binary) | .stl | Intraoral scanners and dental CAD, for printing and milling | A 3D surface | No | Yes, in 3D |
| STL (ASCII) | .stl | The same tools, written as text instead of binary | A 3D surface | No | Yes, in 3D |
| PLY | .ply | Intraoral scanners exporting a scan with its colour | A 3D surface | Yes | Yes, in 3D |
| OBJ | .obj | Scanners and CAD, alongside a separate material file | A 3D surface | Yes | Yes, in 3D |
| OBJ material | .mtl | Written beside an OBJ by the same exporter | Colours and textures for an OBJ, not geometry | No | No |
| glTF (binary) | .glb | 3D tools and CAD; the texture travels inside the file | A 3D surface | Yes | Yes, in 3D |
| glTF | .gltf | 3D tools and CAD; the texture travels beside the file | A 3D surface | Yes | Yes, in 3D |
| ZIP archive | .zip | Cone beam exports, and most vendor bundles under their own extension | Other files, packed | — | Yes — expanded in the browser first, then what is inside opens |
| 7-Zip archive | .7z | Whoever compressed the study before sending it | Other files, packed | — | No |
| RAR archive | .rar | Whoever compressed the study before sending it | Other files, packed | — | No |
| TAR archive | .tar | Whoever compressed the study before sending it | Other files, packed | — | No |
| gzip archive | .gz .tgz | Whoever compressed the study before sending it | Other files, packed | — | No |
| Reports, treatment plans and referral letters | A document, not an image | Yes | No |
| Extension | Vendor | What it really is | How we know |
|---|---|---|---|
| .tw | Carestream Dental | A renamed ZIP archive holding the study | Opened here, from a real clinical file |
| .meditmesh | Medit | A closed format with no public specification | Opened here, from a real clinical file |
| .trophy | Carestream Dental | A renamed ZIP archive holding the study | From the vendor documentation |
| .3oxz | 3Shape | A renamed ZIP archive holding the study | From the vendor documentation |
| .3ox | 3Shape | A renamed ZIP archive holding the study | From the vendor documentation |
| .dentalproject | exocad | A renamed ZIP archive holding the study | From the vendor documentation |
| .sdx | Dentsply Sirona | A renamed ZIP archive holding the study | From the vendor documentation |
| .dcm30 | Generic | A plain DICOM file under another name | From the vendor documentation |
| .dc3 | Generic | A plain DICOM file under another name | From the vendor documentation |
| .dicm | Generic | A plain DICOM file under another name | From the vendor documentation |
A mesh — a 3D surface made of triangles. Most scanners write STL, because that is what printers and mills consume. PLY and OBJ are the colour-capable alternatives, and some tools write glTF or GLB. An intraoral scanner never produces a radiograph: it is an optical device, so nothing it writes is DICOM.
A DICOM file: the standard every X-ray device writes, from intraoral sensors to panoramic units to cone beam scanners. It holds the image plus a header describing how it was acquired, including the device, the exposure and, normally, the patient name and date of birth. One trap: 3Shape names its own mesh case files .dcm too, so a .dcm is not always a radiograph.
Because it was exported as STL, and STL has no field for colour at all. The scanner shows colour on its own screen and then discards it on export. Export the same case as PLY, which stores a colour per vertex, or as OBJ with its material file and texture, or as GLB, which packs the texture inside one file.
Slice by slice, yes. Drop the zip or select all the slices and this page scrolls the stack, decoding one slice at a time. What a browser cannot do is reconstruct the volume: there is no multiplanar reformat and no 3D rendering here, because a full cone beam stack decoded in memory runs to hundreds of megabytes.
That is normal for a cone beam export, which often writes its slices with no extension at all. It is also why this page reads the first bytes of a file before it looks at the name, and tells you which of the two it trusted. Drop the file and it will be named even when nothing about it is labelled.
A Carestream bundle. It is a renamed ZIP archive: a real one holds the radiograph as DICOM alongside a few XML sidecars and a thumbnail image. This page expands it in your browser and opens the radiograph inside. Several other vendors are documented as doing the same thing under their own extension, such as .3ox and .3oxz, .sdx and .dentalproject.
No. There is no upload endpoint on this page. Every file is read by your browser from your own disk and drawn locally, including archives, which are expanded in the browser tab. That matters more here than for a general file tool, because a DICOM header normally carries the patient name, identifier and date of birth beside the image.
7-Zip, RAR, TAR and gzip archives are named but not expanded, so re-export the study as a ZIP or a plain folder. A password-protected ZIP stops at the password. Closed vendor formats such as Medit .meditMesh cannot be read by anyone but their own software. PDF reports are named, not drawn. DICOM whose pixels are JPEG 2000, JPEG-LS or RLE is identified and its encoding named, but not decoded.