Turn your Google Chrome into a DICOM Viewer with These Free Extensions

Google Chrome is a web browser that holds 65.21% of the web browser market, according to Statista. It has a vast marketplace of extensions and themes that allows users to extend its functionality for free.

However, as many browsers are based on the same engine, Chrome extensions can work easily on them.

In the medical sector, Google Chrome is no different, and it is the favorite browser for many doctors and medical students.

Google Chrome has many DICOM extensions that enable viewing DICOM and medical image files directly within the bowler without the need for external software or even an online connection.

Using DICOM image viewer Chrome extensions can save the end-user a lot of time dealing with high-resources programs. Nevertheless, it may not be that efficient as most of them are limited.

Here in this post, we evaluate the best Google Chrome DICOM viewers Extensions for Google Chrome in order to help doctors and medical students choose the right one.

1- DICOM image viewer

DICOM image viewer extension that allows viewing and displaying many DICOM formats. Furthermore, it supports remote DICOM URL viewing, and can work in offline mode without the need of any internet connection.

It is easy to install, and use directly without configuration.

Features

• View online DICOM files by clicking DICOM URLs
• View offline DICOM by dragging files onto Chrome, or use the built-in file browser to select files.
• In terminal, use CLI tool to open DICOM files via this extension.
• Shortcut (CTRL+u/cmd+u) to open extension viewer page. Or click extension icon.
• Support adjustable window center mode.
• Support multi-frame, RGB DICOM files
• Support different plane views mode

It is important to consider that this extension lacks DICOM video format support, YBR Photometric DICOM, and several image viewing tools.

2- dicom.link DicomViewer

This extension is an advanced DICOM viewer. dicom.link and a DicomProxy frontend. It works for local medical images (DICOM images) files or dicom.link products.

Features

• dicomweb connectivity
• WebRTC's connectivity (using dicom.link DicomProxy) to access your services behind firewall.
• Drag and drop folders/files/zip archvies, including AES encrypted zips
• Save folder to zip archive
• Orthogonal MPR
• DICOM viewing tools
• Most used transfer syntaxes
• Upload local images to your dicom.link CloudPACS account or your standard PACS
• Secure and anonymous share your local files with other peers via WebRTC.

3- MRI Scalar

MRI Scalar is a free DICOM (Medical Imaging Format) viewer extension. It supports DICOM and NIFTI formats by default.

It uses Papaya open-source JavaScript DICOM viewer, and it  also released as an open-source as it is.

It is an orthogonal viewer that supports overlays, atlases, GIFTI surface data and DTI data.

MRI Scalar supports other formats as GIFTI, and VTK. It is an ideal lightweight low-resources solution for doctors.

The extension is intended for advanced users as medical students, Neuro specialists, doctors, medical researchers, and MRI Technologists.

DICOM Image Viewer Chrome Extensions, can saves time and resources, however, they may not be feature-rich like DICOM desktop programs or Web-based DICOM viewers. You may think over them as ready to go lightweight tools in your personal laptop or Chromebook.