When requesting copies of X-ray or other medical imaging studies, it’s typical to receive a CD-ROM containing the images in an apparently inscrutable DICOM format. The CD usually contains a viewer since it’s recognized that DICOM is not a format typically openable with consumer-grade applications; however, the viewer is typically a Windows-only application.

Luckily it turns out that DICOM is a widespread, well-documented and general standard for medical imaging, including provisions for metadata and custom fields, ability to use multi-layer images, and it supports all kinds of medical imaging needs, not just X-rays. So even if it’s a bit niche and not heard-of too much, it’s fairly easy to find ways to view DICOM images on Linux or Mac.

On Linux apt-cache search dicom reveals a plethora of applications able to not only open DICOM images, but connect to a DICOM network to send data back and forth. Some of them have a GUI but in the end I settled for dcmtk which has a command (dcm2pnm +on DICOM_FILE image.png) with which I was able to convert those files to pngs to share with, you know, actual humans who live in the 21st century.

At least they didn’t send us the imaging results by fax…