Which Elbow MRI, X-ray and CT Files Open Here

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 an elbow study usually looks like when it lands on your computer

An elbow MRI is typically a set of axial, coronal and sagittal proton-density fat-saturated series shot over a small field of view centered on the joint — small enough that the whole study is quick to download even on a slow connection. If your radiologist was checking the distal biceps tendon, expect a separate FABS series taken with your arm flexed, abducted and supinated overhead; that stack is often exported as its own folder or its own ZIP rather than bundled with the rest of the exam. When the concern is the ulnar collateral ligament or the capitellum, look for thin coronal slices through those structures specifically rather than the wider spacing used elsewhere in the same study.

Elbow X-ray series usually include an AP view, a lateral view, and a radial-head oblique that angles around the forearm bones to clear the overlap between the radius and ulna. The lateral view is also the one radiologists check for a posterior fat pad sign, a subtle triangular shadow behind the joint that can be the only visible clue to an otherwise occult fracture in a child or adult. Emergency department elbow films are increasingly handed over through a patient portal rather than a disc, so the download you get may be a single ZIP of DICOM images rather than a CD with a DICOMDIR file. Elbow CT, by contrast, is ordered less often but does specific jobs well: mapping coronoid and radial head fractures before surgery, and hunting for loose intra-articular bodies that plain films can miss.

Hospitals hand these studies over in a handful of shapes: a small, high-resolution DICOM folder that downloads in under a minute for a routine outpatient MRI, a matching FABS folder acquired on the same visit but exported as its own stack because of the different arm position, a set of emergency department radiographs pulled straight from a patient portal as a ZIP, an older-style hospital CD carrying a DICOMDIR index alongside the images, or a NIfTI export produced when the study has passed through a research pipeline rather than staying in its native scanner format.

Slice thickness and why your elbow scan may or may not build a 3D model

Volume rendering depends on having enough close, evenly spaced slices to interpolate between. A small-field elbow MRI acquired at 2–3 mm spacing gives excellent in-plane detail on the ligaments and cartilage but only a thin slab of coverage, so a 3D reconstruction from it will look coarse or simply refuse to build. The FABS stack compounds this: because it is acquired in an unusual oblique plane to follow the biceps tendon's course, it reformats poorly into standard axial, coronal and sagittal views even though each individual slice displays fine on its own. Isotropic elbow CT is the opposite case — voxels of equal size in every direction mean the same dataset reconstructs cleanly into any plane, which is exactly why surgeons planning around a coronoid or radial head fracture usually ask for CT rather than MRI. A single lateral elbow radiograph, meanwhile, stays what it is: one flat 2D image with no depth information to reconstruct at all.

When an elbow file won't open the way you expect

The most common surprise with elbow studies is a FABS series showing up as its own separate study rather than inside the main exam folder — if you only dropped the primary folder and a distal biceps view is missing, check the disc or download for a second folder or ZIP labeled with a different series description. Post-operative elbows with a plate, screws, or a radial head implant will still open normally; the metal just produces a bright streak on CT or a signal void on MRI around the hardware, which is expected and not a loading failure. As with other joints, an elbow study handed over on a hospital CD sometimes ships with a Windows-only launcher program — ignore that executable and look for the DICOM or DICOMDIR folder alongside it, which is what actually needs to be dropped into the viewer.

It also helps to check that you have every series you expect before assuming something is broken. A referral for “elbow MRI with FABS” can be split across two separate exports by the imaging center, so a missing distal biceps view is often just a second ZIP you have not downloaded yet rather than a file the viewer failed to read. Radial-head oblique X-rays are sometimes labeled with unfamiliar series descriptions such as “radial head view” or “Greenspan view” on the disc index, which can make them easy to overlook next to the more obvious AP and lateral films. If a file genuinely will not load, confirm it is a real medical image format rather than a scanned report or a screenshot the clinic exported alongside the study — those PDF or JPEG summaries look similar in a folder listing but are not DICOM and were never meant to open in an imaging viewer.