DICOM header viewer
Open or drag DICOM files (.dcm) and see the header: patient, study, series and every tag. The file is read in your browser: nothing is sent to a server.
Drag .dcm files here
or
Hides, on screen only, names, IDs, dates and the other attributes of the DICOM de-identification profile (PS3.15, Basic Profile), plus private attributes.
Summary
Choose or drag one or more DICOM files.
Tags
Tag names: DICOM Standard 2026d (PS3.6, NEMA).
What DICOM is and how to use the viewer
DICOM (Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine) is the international standard for medical images and the information related to them. It is maintained by the DICOM Standards Committee, published by NEMA and also adopted as ISO 12052. A DICOM file (the PS3.10 format) starts with a 128-byte preamble and the letters DICM, followed by the file meta information (group 0002), which declares the transfer syntax: explicit or implicit VR, little or big endian and, when applicable, the image compression (JPEG, JPEG 2000, RLE, among others).
Then comes the data set. Each element has a tag, made of group and element, such as (0010,0010) for the patient name, a VR, which states the type of the value, and the value. Sequences (VR SQ) hold items with other elements, and the image is in the Pixel Data element (7FE0,0010).
How to use: open or drag one or more .dcm files. The viewer shows a summary (patient, study, series, modality, institution and dates) and the tag tree, with tag, name, VR and value, search by tag or name and collapsible sequences. The image is not decoded: reading stops at Pixel Data, and files of hundreds of megabytes are read only up to the end of the header. With Hide patient data, on by default, names, IDs, dates and the other attributes of the PS3.15 de-identification profile are hidden on screen. The file is read in your browser and is not sent or stored.