---
title: "Read DICOM (Tomography) files with 3D Slicer"
date: 2025-12-19
---

If you receive a USB drive with tomography data (for example from a dentist), the files often come in DICOM format (extension `.dcm`).

These files can be read using **3D Slicer**, a free and open source software platform for medical image informatics, image processing, and three-dimensional visualization. It is available for Windows, Linux, and Mac.

You can download it from: <https://download.slicer.org/>

On the USB drive, you will likely find a `Data` folder containing a list of `.dcm` files. You can simply point the 3D Slicer UI to that folder to load and visualize the data.

I tested this on Linux (Debian) in a Chromebook and it works fine.