Best 14 Open source & Free DICOM viewers (Linux, Mac OSX, and Windows)
Note: This article is an Evergreen article. It will receive continues update about the listed applications. You can save it and return to it as a updated resource.
Some people feel comfortable using open source software, or dare I say feel "Free", Medical programs are not different, however there is difficulty finding open source DICOM software in one place to help them decide and use the best alternatives to the commercial paid solutions.
We have covered several DICOM viewers categories, here what we have covered so far:
- +20 Free & Open source DICOM viewers for Windows
- +10 Online Web-based DICOM Viewers & Free DICOM cloud services
- +10 Free & Open source DICOM viewers for Mac OS X
- +15 Best Open source Browser & Web-based DICOM Viewers Projects For building Cloud-ready PACS Interface
Why open source?
- Community powered
- Cost-effective
- Free alternative
1- AMIDE
AMIDE, was my favorite when I used to be a regular daily Linux user, It's a smooth features-rich DICOM solution. It supports DICOM formats alongside other formats most of them are old but still used around the world.
AMIDE has powerful viewing and displaying tools for DICOM images, but its real power lays in importing, exporting and printing. It can import multiple data sets and raw data files as 8bit,16bit,32bit, float, imports also Acr/Nema 2.0, Analyze (SPM), DICOM 3.0, InterFile3.3, ECAT 6/7, and Gif87a/89a. It has movie generation option, and export studies as XML readable files.
Platform: Linux, Windows, and Mac OSX.
2-Open DICOM viewer
Open DICOM Viewer is a cross-platform DICOM application. It is a lightweight and is portable can work standalone directly from the CD/DVD and removable media. It supports web view display to display DICOM on web-page using Java technologies. It was built using Java, so it works on Windows, Mac OSX and Linux.
Though, Open DICOM viewer was not updated since 2015, but it is still getting many downloads and active users around the world.
Platforms: Windows, Mac OSX, Linux
3-SMILI
SMIL ( Simple Medical Imaging Library Interface ) is not just a DICOM viewer, It's a complete medical imaging visualization kit, SMIL is supporting wide range of medical imaging file extensions , starting with DICOM extensions as *.dcm, .dicom, ima, Nifti (.nii.gz .nii) and GIPL (.gipl) Analyse (.img *.hdr) Raster multimedia formats: PNG, JPEG, BMP, TIFF, PPM. SMIL also supports 3D models and extensions as ( *.vtp *.vtk *.ply *.obj *.stl ).
SMILI is packaged by video tutorials for the doctors , and an extensive documentation for developers including API documentation.
SMIL it was built by Python/ C++ and released under BSD 3-Clause License.
Platform: Linux, Windows and Mac OSX.
4-DicomPyler
DicomPyler is a lightweight DICOM viewer, It works well on multiple operating systems, It supports remote DICOM viewing.
DicomPyler views CT/MR/PET images, disable DICOM tree structure, and provide patient anonymizer display set. DicomPyler was written using Python, and released under BSD license.
Platforms: Windows, Mac OSX and Linux
5- xMedCon
xMedCon is a DICOM viewer that provides DICOM images conversion functionality, It was written with C language and works flawlessly, It gives the user the option as well to export to jpg still image or gif animated image. xMedCon library has been used in several projects and proven to be a powerful base for DICOM related projects.
xMedCon has installation packages for Windows, Mac OSX, Linux ( Centos and Fedora ), Sabayon Linux, Debian, and FreeBSD systems.
6- Weasis
Weasis is a powerful standalone and web viewer DICOM workstation, It was built to manage DICOM workstations for hospitals, It utilizes OpenCV library which is a powerful CV ( Computer Vision ) programming library, and uses it to render and process the medical images. Weasis supports PACS servers. Weasis runs on Windows, Mac OSX and Linux. Weasis has a user-friendly interface and highly customizable. It supports multiple languages, themes, and multi-touch features.
Weasis released as an open source under Eclipse Public License (EPL).
7- Ginkgo CADx
Ginkgo CADx is a DICOM viewer built to work on Windows, Linux and Mac OSX, It supports converting images like jpeg, pdf, tiff and png to DICOM formats. It supports many ( not all ) PACS servers and many modalities. It was released under GPL 3.0 license and begin used by doctors all over the world for years.
8- 3DimViewer
3DimViewer is a features-rich DICOM viewer program, It works on multiple operating systems. It's released as an open source project under Apache License v2.0.
3DimViewer supports 3D visualization and smooth 3D surface rendering, DICOM dataset imports, Volume rendering using graphics cards as NVidia or ATI, Multiplanar, and orthogonal XY, XZ and YZ views, multiple image manipulation tools.
Platform: Windows and Mac OSX.
9-DICOM Viewer & Editor
This DICOM viewer has been developed using Qt library with Qt Creator on Linux, It has easy and simple user-interface. DICOM Viewer & Editor ( Yes that's its name ), allow the user to view and modify DICOM tags on single or multiple files, dump DICOM tags in single file and of course display DICOM files.
10- Horos ( Open source DICOM viewer for Mac OSX )
Horos is a DICOM viewer for Mac OSX, it was released as an open source under GPL 3.0 license. It's features-rich DICOM viewer built for professional use. It was built on top of Osirix. We have published a snap review about Horos in here
Platform: Mac OSX
11- ClearCanvas
ClearCanvas is an open source & free DICOM viewer for Windows, It supports the latest Windows version Windows 10, It also supports older version releases.
Platform: Windows
12- Miele-LXIV
Miele-LXIV is a native build DICOM Workstation/ Viewer for Mac OSX. It supports old macOSX version and has many advanced features that sets it to compete with the enterprise DICOM workstation for Mac OSX.
Platform: Mac OSX
13- DicomBrowser: Batch DICOM editor and browser
DicomBrowser is lightweight cross-platform DICOM batch editor and viewer. It has many functionalities that helps the users to batch edit DICOM tags for thousands of files at once.
14- JimboDICOMViewer
JimboDICOMViewer is an open source DICOM viewer and a DICOM convertor. It's available for all Linux distros that supports Snap Package manager. It's also available for Windows.
Free DICOM Viewer for Windows!
If you are looking for free DICOM viewers for Windows, We have created a list for that here (20 Free DICOM viewers for Windows)
