How to use NoustaView.

Everything below happens in the browser tab you already have open. No install, no account, and no server sitting in the imaging path.

Reviewed by Dr. KW Chan, Radiologist · Updated 3 October 2026

Before you start

Use a Chromium browser — Chrome, Edge, Brave or Opera. Firefox and Safari will open the viewer, but folder loading may not work there, and that's the quickest way to end up with a study you can't load.

16GB of RAM is the recommendation for large or multi-study loads. Thin-slice CT is where that number comes from: one series can run into hundreds, sometimes thousands, of images. On a smaller machine, load one series at a time rather than the whole study.

GPU rendering is used automatically when your browser supports it, with CPU rendering as the fallback. You don't choose between them, and which one you get doesn't change what is on screen — only how it's computed. On a phone or tablet the viewer runs CPU-only by design.

The first time you open the viewer, a short welcome notice lists those same requirements. On a phone, a quick-tips screen for the touch gestures follows it. Then comes the terms acknowledgement — tick the box, confirm, and you're in.

Opening a study

Open a file, a folder, or a .zip from your own drive. Archives load directly, so there's nothing to extract first, which is one of the more useful things about a viewer that reads files in the tab rather than on a server. You can also drag and drop a study anywhere onto the viewer window.

Everything is decoded and rendered here. Nothing is uploaded unless you choose Share Case, and you can keep working offline while the tab stays open.

If you're loading a whole folder of images, that's the one place the browser really matters — folder loading is a Chromium feature.

Browsing series

The sidebar, Studies & Series, lists whatever you have loaded. A study expands into its series; double-click a series to load it into the active panel, and use Sort to reverse the study order when you're working through a long list.

Several studies can sit in memory at once, and the viewer manages that load as you add more. Scroll sync keeps matched series moving together when you're comparing them.

Loading a series takes a double-click on purpose. It stops a stray click from pulling a large series into a panel you were only passing over.

Window/level and the everyday tools

Window/level, zoom and pan are the three you'll use constantly, and on desktop the mouse buttons are the fastest route to all of them: right-drag adjusts contrast, middle-drag zooms, and holding left and right together pans. Each tool also has its own toolbar button with its current key shown on the button itself. The window presets give you a standard starting point, and the Shortcuts panel lists the current key for each preset.

Annotations are on by default. The Annotations button hides patient, study and series text along with measurement marks — for a clean screenshot. It hides, it doesn't delete. Anonymize does the narrower job of hiding patient name, ID and date of birth from the overlays.

Layouts cover the usual arrangements, including a 2×5 grid for setting several series side by side. Six colour themes are available; the image panels stay black in every one of them, which is what correct windowing requires.

Multiplanar reconstruction

All three planes — axial, sagittal, coronal — are freely rotatable around any axis, never locked to 90°, and always mutually consistent with each other. Reference lines show the others' real angle, so an oblique reconstruction still tells you where you are.

Thickness reconstructs thicker slabs on the fly: set a value in millimetres and each plane combines that many millimetres of samples instead of one thin sample. Average is the standard thick-slice reformat and smooths noise. MIP keeps the brightest sample at each pixel in the slab, which brings vessels, contrast and calcification forward. Equal Size switches between one large plane with two small reference planes, and all three at the same size.

Reslicing runs on the GPU where your browser supports it, which is what makes rotating a volume feel immediate rather than approximate.

DICOM, the standard that stores and exchanges medical imaging studies, is published by NEMA.

Measurements

Length and angle measurement, plus an HU probe with an adjustable sampling area — rectangular or round, whichever suits the structure you're measuring.

Marks belong to the panel they were drawn on, and an export includes them only if you leave Include measurement marks / crosshair ticked. Clear All Marks clears every panel, not just the active one.

Exam / Class Mode

Exam/Class Mode is built for running an assessment or a class. It loads every study in the set into memory, so once the set is in, you can unplug the source drive and nothing is lost.

Export, printing and Share Case are locked for the session while it's on. The mode can't be switched off — closing the tab is the only way out, which is the whole point. Nothing to remember, nothing to disarm mid-exam.

With several cases loaded, the Question controls step through the set: previous and next series within a case, and previous and next case.

Share Case

Share Case (Supporter and Pro) sends a de-identified copy to a link you control. There's a mandatory preview before anything is sent, and only what you've reviewed and confirmed in that step goes anywhere.

The link can be password-protected, given an expiry, and revoked early from your dashboard. Whoever opens it needs no account and no install, and it works the same on a workstation and on a phone.

Some ultrasound and screen-capture images carry text burned into the pixels, where it can't be removed by dropping identifiers alone. Share Case flags series likely to contain such text, based on their image type and tags. When you open a series' Redact text panel, it looks for the text on your device — the detection runs in your browser and uploads nothing — and lets you hide what you choose. A flagged series must be marked as reviewed before Confirm will let the share through. Detection can miss text, so check the preview: it reduces what a recipient sees without guaranteeing the copy is fully de-identified.

Hosting shared cases will be funded by Supporter and Pro subscriptions. Your own images aren't part of that trade.

Load from PACS

Load from PACS (Supporter and Pro) searches and opens studies straight from a PACS that supports DICOMweb. The images travel from your PACS into this tab and never pass through a NoustaView server. DICOMweb is defined in DICOM PS3.18.

Set a connection up once and it's saved for next time: a name, the DICOMweb base address, and the sign-in method — none, username and password, or an access token. Test connection confirms it before you rely on it. The password or token is kept for the tab only, unless you tick Remember the password/token on this device.

Three things have to be true. The PACS must be reachable from this browser over https://. It must allow requests from this site (CORS). And some browsers ask permission before a website may reach a server on a private network — allow that prompt when it appears.

The retrieve asks the PACS for uncompressed images. A PACS that can't transcode is reported rather than quietly half-loaded.

Keyboard shortcuts

Every shortcut is yours to rebind, and the settings are saved on your own machine. A different computer, or a cleared browser, gets the defaults back.

Open the ⌨ Shortcuts panel to see the current key for each tool and action. Click Change, then press the key you want. If the key is already in use, it's taken from that other shortcut, which stays flagged as unbound until you give it a new one. Reset to defaults restores everything at once.

Two keys are worth knowing before you open that panel: T hides the toolbar, and F11 gives you the browser's own full screen. Together they leave the image on an otherwise empty screen.

On a phone or tablet

The toolbar narrows to what works with a thumb. Tap a series under Studies to load it into the active panel.

Drag one finger across the image to scroll slices, adjust contrast, or measure — which one it does depends on the tool selected: ↕ Scroll-drag, ◐ Contrast, or 📏 Measure. Tap Measure again to switch between Length and Angle.

Pinch with two fingers to zoom, drag with two fingers to pan, and swipe left or right with one finger while Scroll-drag is selected to move between series. Hide UI clears the toolbar for a full-screen view, and the small handle brings it back.

If something doesn't work

Folder loading does nothing. You're probably in Firefox or Safari. Use a Chromium browser.

Loading stalls, or the tab runs out of memory. Load fewer series at once. A multi-study load is the heaviest thing you can ask of it, and 16GB is the recommendation for exactly that reason.

Rendering looks different from another machine. GPU rendering is used when the browser supports it, CPU otherwise. Both are correct, and the fallback path is what you get whenever WebGL isn't available.

The PACS connection times out. Check the address, that this computer is on the network or VPN the PACS is reachable from, and that the PACS allows requests from this site. An https:// page can't load from a plain http:// PACS.

A PACS series loads with images missing. Those instances are compressed in a form the viewer has no codec for. They're reported as skipped rather than silently dropped.

A shared link asks for a password, or won't open. It may be password-protected or past its expiry. Whoever sent it can check both, and revoke it, from their dashboard.

If something here is wrong

A guide goes stale faster than anything else on a site. If a step doesn't match what you see, or something is missing from it, the feedback page sends straight through — and a bug report with steps to reproduce is worth more than a paragraph describing it. For what NoustaView does and doesn't do with your data, see the privacy policy.