Read DICOM (Tomography) files with 3D Slicer

Author

Andrea Zonca

Published

December 19, 2025

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.