Dental CBCT, Panoramic, and Intraoral Scan Files We Can Open

Archive formats

If your scan came as one big compressed file, drop it directly into the viewer — we unpack it in your browser.

• ZIP — the most common format on hospital CDs and patient-portal downloads
• TAR — common for research datasets
• .tar.gz and .tgz — TAR + GZIP compressed

DICOM transfer syntaxes

The technical format used to encode pixel data inside a DICOM file. Our viewer decodes every common transfer syntax used by clinical scanners.

• Implicit VR Little Endian (1.2.840.10008.1.2)
• Explicit VR Little Endian (1.2.840.10008.1.2.1)
• JPEG Lossless (1.2.840.10008.1.2.4.70)
• JPEG Extended 12-bit (used by i-CAT dental CBCT)
• RLE Lossless
• 8-bit, 12-bit, and 16-bit pixel data
• MONOCHROME1 and MONOCHROME2 photometric interpretations

NIfTI (research / converted scans)

NIfTI (Neuroimaging Informatics Technology Initiative) is the format used by most research and post-processing tools. If you ran your scan through a pipeline like FreeSurfer or fastMRI, you likely have a NIfTI file.

• .nii — uncompressed NIfTI volume
• .nii.gz — GZIP-compressed NIfTI (most common)

Compatibility at a glance

What a dental study actually looks like when it arrives

Most people land on this page holding one of five things. The first is a cone-beam CT volume: a stack of DICOM slices with isotropic voxels, usually somewhere between 0.075 mm and 0.4 mm on a side, covering anything from a single-tooth field of view up to a full maxillofacial scan that includes both jaws and the airway. The second is a panoramic radiograph — a flat, wraparound image of both arches that a unit either captures directly with its own sensor or generates as a byproduct of a CBCT reconstruction. The third is a periapical or bitewing film, the small single-tooth or two-tooth image a hygienist takes chairside; these show up as tiny individual DICOM objects or, just as often, as JPEG or TIFF exports pulled straight out of the practice's imaging software.

The fourth is a medical CT of the jaws ordered by an oral surgeon rather than a general dentist, reformatted along the dental arch the same way a CBCT is, but shot on a hospital-grade scanner with thicker slices. The fifth is not a radiograph at all: an STL or PLY mesh produced by an intraoral scanner during a same-day crown or aligner workflow. It describes tooth surfaces as a 3D shape, carries no radiation dose and no pixel density, and belongs in dental CAD software rather than a medical image viewer.

How the practice packaged what they gave you

Every major cone-beam manufacturer — Planmeca, Dentsply Sirona, Carestream, NewTom, Vatech, and J. Morita — ships its own Windows-only review application on the disc alongside the actual scan data, and that installer is never what you need. Some units write the volume as a folder of individually numbered DICOM slices with a DICOMDIR index sitting at the root; others, particularly on newer firmware, bundle the entire volume into a single multi-frame DICOM object instead of hundreds of separate files. Both layouts work the same way here: drop the folder (or the one file) in and the viewer sorts it out.

A separate, very common situation has nothing to do with disc format at all: the practice simply emails a PDF report with a handful of embedded JPEG screenshots instead of handing over the underlying volume. That PDF is fine for a second opinion on what a radiologist already wrote, but it is not the scan itself and can't be reconstructed into 3D. If you need the real volume, ask the front desk specifically for “the DICOM export of the CBCT,” not just “a copy of my scan” — that phrase gets you the imaging data rather than another PDF.

Why voxel size and field of view decide what you can see

A CBCT volume is isotropic — each voxel measures the same distance in every direction — which is exactly what lets it be resliced cleanly into cross-sectional cuts across an implant site, a panoramic-style curve along the arch, and axial slices through the jaws, all from the same acquisition. That flexibility is the entire basis of implant planning: measuring bone height and width from a cross-sectional cut is only reliable because the voxel is cubic, not stretched.

A panoramic radiograph, by contrast, is already a flattened reconstruction by the time it exists as a file, so no amount of reslicing gives it depth — it stays 2D whether a dedicated panoramic unit captured it or a CBCT workstation generated it afterward. Periapical films are 2D from the sensor onward and never carry volumetric information at all. And within CBCT itself, a wider field of view that captures both jaws in one pass generally comes at the cost of a coarser voxel size than a small, single-tooth acquisition — coverage and resolution trade against each other on the same unit.

When the disc won't give up a usable file

Two dental-specific dead ends come up often. Planmeca units sometimes hand out Romexis project files, and Anatomage workstations export their own Invivo project files — both wrap the underlying DICOM inside a proprietary container built for that vendor's planning software, and no browser-based viewer, ours included, can open the project file directly. The fix is the same either way: go back to the practice and ask them to re-export the study as plain DICOM rather than as a Romexis or Invivo project, which most vendor software can do in a couple of clicks from inside the case.

The other dead end is a disc that asks for a password before anything on it will open. Some practice-management systems encrypt the export by default for HIPAA compliance when a patient requests their own imaging. If that happens, call the practice and ask for the password, or ask them to burn an unencrypted copy — encrypted discs aren't something a browser can work around, and it isn't a limitation of this viewer specifically.

Not sure which of these you were handed?

Look at the file count before anything else: hundreds of similarly-sized small files is almost always a sliced CBCT volume, one larger file is likely a single multi-frame object, one or two small images are periapical or bitewing films, and a single wide image is a panoramic radiograph. If you genuinely can't tell, drop the whole folder into the viewer anyway — it inspects what it finds and tells you what it identified before it tries to render anything.