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dcmview documentation

Inspect DICOM where the data already live, without setting up a permanent viewer or sending files to a third party.
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dcmview is a fast, temporary DICOM viewer for developers, data scientists, and medical imaging researchers. Give it one or more local files or directories and it starts an embedded browser viewer for pixels, tags, logical series, cine playback, references, and rectangular ROI annotations. Every API request needs the session’s access token, which the viewer link carries. Stop the process and the local server, its token, caches, and in-memory edits disappear.

Section titled “Viewer gallery”

Cine playback and semantic context

Section titled “Cine playback and semantic context”

Chest CT cine playback in dcmview

DICOM SEG semantic overlay in dcmview

Modality coverage

Section titled “Modality coverage”

Chest radiograph in dcmview

Mammography study in dcmview

PET cine playback in dcmview

Ultrasound cine playback in dcmview

RT Dose semantic context in dcmview

DICOM whole-slide microscopy context in dcmview

Source imagery attribution

Choose your workflow

Section titled “Choose your workflow”
If you want to… Start here
Open a file or study directory from a shell Install dcmview and inspect a first image
Inspect data on a remote server Forward the loopback viewer over SSH
Launch from a script or notebook Use dcmview from Python
Stay inside your editor Open DICOM data in VS Code
Load, edit, and export rectangular ROIs Work with annotations
Understand what the viewer can and cannot render Review DICOM support boundaries

What the viewer provides

Section titled “What the viewer provides”
  • Recursive file discovery with metadata filters and progressive results.
  • Study, series, logical-frame, and local DICOM-reference navigation.
  • Server-rendered PNG and client-side raw-frame paths with consistent, live windowing.
  • A cursor pixel readout of stored, Modality, and real-world values, and window/level in real-world units with a legend.
  • Pan, zoom, scroll, window/level, presets, flips, rotation, cine controls, and an image-position scrubber.
  • Lazy tag browsing with sequence expansion and selective retrieval.
  • Conservative context for SEG, Parametric Map, RT Dose, and positioned WSI tiles, including validated geometry-aligned SEG composition and RT Dose and Parametric Map colorwash overlays.
  • In-memory EMBED-style rectangular ROI editing and CSV export.
  • Display masking (--mask) and redaction boxes for showing files on a shared screen. Masking is a display aid, not de-identification.
  • The same self-contained Rust viewer through the CLI, Python package, and VS Code extension.

Deliberate limits

Section titled “Deliberate limits”

dcmview has no database, user accounts, persistent viewer state, or configuration files. The HTTP API is an internal debugging surface, not a stable public integration API. Semantic panels, readouts, and overlays do not establish clinical correctness: ambiguous SEG, RT Dose, or Parametric Map geometry disables overlay eligibility, and WSI support positions one selected tile without stitching a whole slide.

This site documents the stable v0.4.1 release. See the documentation source for the exact commit.

Section titled “Project links”