DICOM (Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine) is the universal format for medical images — CT, MRI, X-ray, and ultrasound worldwide all use it.

Every .dcm file contains two things fused together: the pixel data (the image) and rich metadata tags describing the patient, equipment, and acquisition parameters.

DICOM metadata is structured as tag–value pairs. Each tag is a hex pair like (0010,0020). There are thousands of standardised tags covering everything from Slice Thickness to Scanner Manufacturer.

CT scanners measure X-ray attenuation in Hounsfield Units (HU): air ≈ −1000, water = 0, bone ≈ +1000. Because a monitor shows only 256 grey levels, we window the data — choosing a centre (WL) and width (WW) to zoom in on the tissue of interest.

Try the presets above: Soft Tissue for organs, Bone for skeletal detail, Lung for airways.

This series is the s629 fixture used to test AIATELLA's AortaAIM pipeline — a thoracic/abdominal CT converted from NIfTI format, with 440 axial slices at 244 × 244 px.

Scroll through the slices to watch the aorta's cross-section appear, expand, and contract as you move from chest to abdomen.

Modern CT scanners capture dozens of axial slices as they rotate around the patient. Stack 440 of them and you have a full 3-D volume — exactly what automated measurement software analyses.

AortaAIM is AIATELLA's automated measurement software for the aorta. It takes a DICOM series like this one as input and automatically delivers precise clinical measurements — the kind that would otherwise require specialist manual analysis. Fast, consistent, and designed to integrate into existing clinical workflows.