How to view your CT / MRI / ultrasound scan CD in your browser - open it on your phone or PC, no upload

🌐 อ่านหน้านี้เป็นภาษาไทย →

On your phone or tablet - 3 steps, nothing to install

1. Get your scan onto the phone as a zip - zip the CD and send it to yourself via Google Drive / LINE / email (how to zip a CD is below). Download it.
2. Open clearevo.com/dicom in Chrome, tap the blinking Open file button (top-left), pick the zip.
3. Swipe through slices · pinch to zoom · Brightness to adjust · 📏 Measure for distances.

No scan yet? Tap ▶ Try a demo scan (150 MB) - my own ear CT - then Open file → pick the downloaded zip.

On a PC: same page, same steps - drag the zip onto the page, mouse wheel browses slices, Ctrl + wheel zooms.

Free, no sign-up, and your images never leave your device (verify). Not a medical device - for viewing your own scans, not for diagnosis; provided as is, no warranty.

Make a zip from the CD

If you only have a CD, make the zip on a Windows PC with a CD drive (or a cheap USB CD drive plugged into any PC):

• Right-click an empty spot on the Desktop, choose New → Folder, and type a name, e.g. myscan.
• Put the CD in and open it: double-click This PC, then double-click the CD/DVD drive.
• Press Ctrl+A (selects all the files), then Ctrl+C (copies them).
• Double-click your new myscan folder on the Desktop and press Ctrl+V (pastes) - wait until copying finishes.
• Go back to the Desktop and right-click the myscan folder: pick Compress to ZIP file (Windows 11) or Send to → Compressed (zipped) folder (Windows 10). A myscan.zip file appears next to the folder - that’s the file you’ll open in the viewer.

An unzipped folder or loose .dcm files work too. (.tar.gz, .7z and .rar aren’t supported - unzip those to a folder and zip that instead.)

Tools in the viewer

• Starts in Simple mode - Browse (swipe/scroll slices), Brightness, Zoom, 📏 Measure (mm, Undo pt removes points), Play for clips, Save image (PNG to Downloads). Picking a tool plays a short animated hint of its gesture on the image.
• Phone: swipe slices, pinch zoom, drag to pan when zoomed, double-tap to zoom.
• Pick a series from the thumbnails (left on PC, top on phone). Ultrasound and other clips play like video - Play, or drag the slider frame by frame.

The interface is available in English and ไทย (auto-selected from your browser; switch with the language box).

What can it open?

The DICOM format - which is what most medical CDs and USBs are:

• MRI and CT scans - flip through the image slices the same way the radiologist does, with one-tap display presets (soft tissue, brain, lung, bone).
• Ultrasound - still images and moving clips (they play like video, at the clip’s own frame rate). Pregnancy ultrasound CDs work too.
• X-ray / mammogram CDs use the same DICOM format and should open as well - if yours doesn’t, tell me in the comments.

What the demo scans show

The demos show a left superior semicircular canal dehiscence (SCDS) in my inner ear - which is why I built this tool: I wanted to see my own problem directly in Chrome on my phone, without having to find a PC to open the CD. So you can match what you see against a real reading, summarized from the professional radiology reports of these scans (identifying details removed):

• CT temporal bone - “A focal bony dehiscence at the superoposterior aspect of the left superior semicircular canal.” The right inner ear is unremarkable. Open the thin-slice IAC Lt cor obl 0.6 mm series (the reformats along the canal - the demo-button zip contains exactly this series) and pick the Bone window preset.
• MRI brain / base of skull - reviewed for the same: “suspected focal thinning of the bony coverage at the posterior aspect of the left superior semicircular canal; dehiscence cannot be excluded”, with incidental sinus changes. Clinical picture: chronic dizziness.

Download the full CDs (GPL)

I share both anonymized scans for education and testing under the GNU GPL v2 (same license as the site’s tools) - each is the complete CD as a zip, with a LICENSE.txt inside. These are the same files the viewer’s demo buttons download - after downloading, press Open file in the viewer and pick the zip.

• Download the full CT temporal-bone CD (~1.2 GB zip, GPL)
• Download the full MRI brain / base-of-skull CD (~870 MB zip, GPL)

Technical details

• Switch the toolbar to Advanced mode (dropdown at the right) for the standard vocabulary and full toolset: W/L with CT presets (soft tissue, brain, lung, bone), Pan, Angle, Rotate/Flip (anatomical edge markers are hidden while rotated or mirrored rather than shown wrong), Invert, Tags (every DICOM element), named-PNG export. The choice is remembered on that browser.
• Transfer syntaxes decoded: Implicit/Explicit VR Little Endian, RLE, JPEG Lossless (processes 14/SV1 and 14), JPEG Baseline (8-bit, ultrasound), and JPEG 2000 (lossless and lossy). Multi-frame instances play as cine at the file’s FrameTime.
• Privacy is verifiable, not just claimed: the images are decoded entirely in the browser and never uploaded - how to verify yourself. Free software, GPL v2, source on GitHub.

Limitations

• Decodes uncompressed DICOM, RLE, JPEG Lossless (most CT/MRI CDs), standard JPEG (ultrasound) and JPEG 2000. Not yet: JPEG-LS, big-endian, and video-inside-DICOM (MPEG) - if your CD won’t open, tell me in the comments.
• Opens .zip, an unzipped folder, or loose .dcm files.
• Google Drive folder integration is planned; for now, download the zip first.
• No MPR / 3D reconstructions - this is a viewer for looking at your scan, not a radiology workstation.

Everything is client-side (Google Analytics for visit stats only - verify).

This tool is free software and open source: ykasidit/clearevo_online_tools - issues and pull requests welcome. The demo CT/MRI scans are my own, anonymized, and released under GPL v2.

Full disclosure: this post - and any code or tool it describes - was co-authored with Claude (Anthropic’s AI, via Claude Code). I directed, guided and reviewed. I don’t want to pretend otherwise.