Visore Radiografie Dentali Online e Gratuito
DICOM is the format every X-ray device writes — intraoral sensors, panoramic units, cephalometric arms and CBCT scanners. Open a .dcm radiograph below: it is read in your browser and never uploaded.
Keep every radiograph on the patient record
DodoDentist stores X-rays, CBCT exports and intraoral scans against the patient and the tooth, alongside charting, treatment planning, reminders and billing.
Try DodoDentist freeA radiograph exported as a JPEG is only the picture. The same radiograph as DICOM carries the acquisition alongside it: which device produced it, the exposure settings, the physical size of a pixel — which is what makes a measurement in millimetres possible — and the window presets the manufacturer thought best suited the image. That is why practices are told to archive the DICOM and treat the JPEG as a copy for sending.
The header also holds the patient name, identifier and date of birth. It is easy to forget, because none of it appears in the image: a file that looks anonymous on screen can still name the patient to anyone who opens it. Anonymise before a radiograph leaves the practice for a laboratory, a study, or a second opinion.
Periapicals and bitewings come from an intraoral sensor or a phosphor plate scanner and show one or two teeth at a time — caries between teeth, root canal length, apical lesions, bone level. A panoramic covers both arches, the jaw joints and the sinuses in one wide image. A lateral cephalogram is the side-of-skull view orthodontics is planned from. All three are single-frame images that a viewer like this one opens directly.
CBCT is the exception. A cone beam scan is a three-dimensional volume delivered as a folder of hundreds or thousands of DICOM slices, often zipped, sometimes with a bundled Windows viewer. Opening a single slice from it shows one thin cross-section rather than the volume, so a CBCT needs dedicated software that reconstructs the stack.
An intraoral scanner does not produce radiographs. It captures the surface of the arches and writes a 3D mesh, usually STL — the same format 3D printers consume. Because both files arrive from "the scanner", they get conflated constantly. The rule is simple: anything involving radiation produces DICOM, and anything optical produces a mesh. One more trap sits on top of it — 3Shape names its own mesh case files .dcm, so the extension alone cannot be trusted, and this page identifies files by their contents instead.
Worth knowing if you export from an intraoral scanner: STL stores geometry only and cannot carry colour. The colour model you see on the scanner survives export only as PLY, which stores colour per vertex, or as OBJ with a separate material and texture file. Export as STL alone and every model arrives grey.
Drop it onto this page. It is read by your browser and drawn on screen, with no upload and no signup. For everyday clinical work a practice normally uses its imaging software or its practice-management system instead.
No. The file never leaves your computer. That matters more here than for most tools, because a DICOM header normally carries the patient name, ID and date of birth alongside the image.
DICOM records whether low pixel values mean white or black. Viewers that ignore that tag show the radiograph inverted. This one reads it, and the Invert control lets you flip it either way.
A radiograph holds more shades of grey than a screen can show at once. The window is how wide a range is mapped onto the visible greys; the level is the centre of that range. Narrowing the window raises contrast over a smaller range, which is how a bone level or an apical lesion is brought out.
Not as a volume. A CBCT export is a folder of hundreds of slices; opening one shows a single cross-section. Reconstructing the stack needs dedicated software.
Not in this viewer — an STL is a 3D surface mesh rather than a radiograph, so it needs a different renderer. Drop one here and the page will tell you what it is instead of failing silently.