How to Burn DICOM Images to a CD or DVD
Burning DICOM studies to a CD or DVD is one of the most common tasks in medical imaging — handing a patient their scans, or sending a study to a referring physician. DICOM Burner does it for free, straight from your PACS, with a DICOM viewer bundled on the disc so recipients can open the images on any Windows PC.
This guide assumes you have DICOM Burner installed and at least one PACS server configured. If you haven't added a PACS server yet, follow the query and retrieve guide first.
- 1
Insert a blank disc and select your burner
Put a blank CD-R or DVD-R into your optical drive. In DICOM Burner, select that drive from the Optical Drive dropdown. If the drive doesn't appear, click Refresh — DICOM Burner detects attached CD/DVD/Blu-ray burners via Windows IMAPI2, and newly plugged-in drives aren't picked up automatically.
- 2
Search your PACS for the study
Choose your PACS server, enter the patient name, patient ID, modality, or study date range, and click Search Studies. DICOM Burner sends a C-FIND query and lists every matching study in the results grid.
- 3
Select the study to burn
Tick the checkbox next to each study you want to burn, or highlight a single row. You can burn multiple studies to one disc.
- 4
Choose a DICOM viewer to include
Pick a viewer from the Viewer dropdown. It gets copied onto the disc alongside the images so recipients can view them without installing anything themselves.
- 5
Click Burn to DVD
Click Burn to DVD. DICOM Burner retrieves the selected study from PACS, generates a DICOMDIR index for DICOM Part 10 compliance, writes everything to the disc, and verifies the result. Watch the Burn & Copy Queue for live progress and a plain-language status message.
Once the queue shows the operation completed and verified, your disc is ready to hand over. The images open in the bundled viewer, and because the disc follows DICOM Part 10 with a proper DICOMDIR, it also opens in any standard third-party DICOM viewer.