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Supported DICOM formats

DICOM is the international standard for medical images. CBCTHub accepts all the common variants that modern dental scanners produce.

Supported extensions

ExtensionTypical source
.dcmThe most common. Any modern scanner.
.dicomVariant of .dcm. Same content.
.imaSiemens, some older Vatech.
No extensionSome scanners export numbered files (IMG001, IMG002...) with no extension. Works the same.
DICOMDIRIndex file. CBCTHub reads it and loads the listed series.

Multiframe DICOM (whole volume in one file)

Some modern scanners (Vatech Green, newer Carestream) export the entire volume as a single DICOM file of several hundred MB instead of hundreds of small files. CBCTHub supports this format:

  • Upload the file directly. No need to extract anything.
  • The viewer processes it internally as if they were individual slices.
  • Loading progress is gradual — you will see slices appearing as they are processed.
NotaIf your scanner gives you the option to export as “multiframe” or “single file DICOM”, both work in CBCTHub. The difference for you is only organizational (one file vs many).

Patient name encoding

DICOMs store the patient name as text, but different scanners use different character encodings (Latin-1, UTF-8, ISO-8859-1, etc.). If your scanner stores the encoding wrong, accents can appear as mojibake:

  • José appears as José
  • María appears as María
  • Sánchez appears as Sánchez

CBCTHub detects the DICOM encoding (the SpecificCharacterSet tag) and tries to decode correctly. If your scanner does not mark the encoding, we can end up with mojibake.

TipIf it always happens with the same scanner, you can edit the patient name manually from the exam detail modal. Also let us know to check if we can detect the encoding better for your specific scanner.

What we do NOT support

  • DICOM SR (Structured Report) — structured reports without images.
  • DICOM Presentation State — only annotations, no image.
  • JPEG 2000 with unusual profiles — advanced lossless compressions that some older scanners exported.

If your DICOM file contains a standard image (CT, X-ray, panoramic), it will work. If it is only metadata without pixels, CBCTHub has nothing to show.