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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-12T12:22:26+00:00

Say, I have a sequence on .dicom files in a folder. The cumulative size

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Say, I have a sequence on .dicom files in a folder. The cumulative size is about 100 Mb. It’s a lot of data. I tried to convert data into .nrrd and .nii, but those files had the summary size of the converted .dicom files (which is fairly predictable, though .nrrd was compressed with gzip). I’d like to know, if there a file format that would give me far less sizes, or just a way to solve that. Perhaps, .vtk, or something else (not sure it qould work). Thanks in advance.

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  1. Editorial Team

    DICOM supports compression of the pixel data within the file itself. The idea of DICOM is that it’s format agnostic from the point of view of the pixel data it holds.

    DICOM can hold raw pixel data and also can hold JPEG-compressed pixel data, as well as many other formats. The transfer syntax tag of the DICOM file gives you the compression protocol of the pixel data within the DICOM.

    The first thing is to figure out whether you need lossless or lossy compression. If lossy, there are a lot of options, and the compression ratio is quite high in some – the tradeoff is that you do lose fidelity and the images may not be adequate for diagnostic purposes. There are also lossless compression schemes – like JPEG2000, RLE and even JPEG-LS. These will compress the pixel data, but retain diagnostic quality without any image degradation.

    You can also zip the files, which, if raw, should produce very good results. What are you looking to do w/ these compressed DICOMs?

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