Free Hip CT Viewer for Fractures, FAI, and Pelvic Ring Injuries
Load a hip or pelvis CT study straight from your discharge disc or imaging portal and inspect it in the browser, slice by slice, without installing anything. The tool is built around the questions a hip CT actually answers “does the femoral neck fracture line extend into the joint”, “how much acetabulum covers the femoral head”, “is the pelvic ring stable” and keeps every file on your own device the whole time.
Load Your Hip CTGetting From Disc To Report
1
Bring in the hip CT folder
Hand the CT export, ZIP archives included, to the uploader and the parser splits the pelvis series into its sharp bone-kernel pass and its softer tissue-kernel pass automatically.
2
Scroll, reformat, and measure
Page through the axial pass, pull up a coronal or sagittal cut, and lay a protractor across the femoral head-neck junction to check the alpha angle yourself.
3
Hand it to the AI panel
Each model separately checks for fracture displacement, joint space narrowing, and implant loosening, then Claude writes up the combined findings as one report you can review.
Why A Hip CT Gets Ordered Instead Of An MRI
A fall or high-energy crash is the usual reason a pelvis CT gets ordered at all: the pelvic ring is curved and three-dimensional, and a plain film flattens exactly the detail a surgeon needs. CT maps an acetabular fracture onto the Judet-Letournel columns, telling an anterior column pattern apart from a posterior wall fragment or a transverse fracture running through both columns, because thin axial slices trace fracture lines through curved bone in a way no flat radiograph can. The same reasoning carries over to femoral neck fractures, where displacement and comminution decide between fixing the head and replacing it, and to suspected pelvic ring injuries, where CT settles whether the sacroiliac joint or pubic symphysis has widened enough to call the ring unstable.
CT is also the default check for femoroacetabular impingement and dysplasia. It measures the alpha angle to flag a cam lesion, checks the acetabular rim for a pincer overhang, and reports acetabular version and coverage in a way a plain radiograph cannot capture consistently. When a hip has advanced osteoarthritis, CT shows joint space narrowing alongside subchondral cysts and sclerosis, and when avascular necrosis is suspected, CT can reveal subtle subchondral collapse of the femoral head before it is visible on X-ray. Before a hip replacement or revision surgery, CT-based planning captures bone stock, version, and prior hardware position in a way a standard radiograph cannot, which is why many pre-operative protocols now call for a dedicated pelvis CT.
What A Hip CT Dataset Actually Contains
A pelvis CT comes off the scanner as one helical run of sub-millimeter axial slices covering both hips, and the raw data gets reconstructed twice: a sharp bone kernel that keeps the acetabular columns and femoral neck crisp, and a softer kernel that tones down the edge noise the bone kernel would otherwise leave in the surrounding muscle and fat. Isotropic voxels mean the coronal and sagittal planes built from that one pass hold full resolution, and for a comminuted acetabular fracture or pre-operative templating, the same data spins up as a 3D pelvis render that shows fragment displacement from angles a flat slice simply cannot offer.
What The Viewer Puts In Your Hands
Your pelvis CT never uploads anywhere
The browser’s own Canvas API does the decoding and drawing. The series stays in IndexedDB on your machine until you choose to clear it.
No PACS software to set up
Forget desktop viewers and plugins. Open a browser tab, drop in the pelvis CT export, and the series is ready in Chrome, Firefox, Safari, or Edge.
Browse both hips slice by slice
Slide or use the keyboard to page through the axial stack, then switch to whichever reformat, coronal across the acetabular roof or sagittal through the femoral neck, shows the fracture line best.
Windowing built for the pelvis
Toggle between a preset that sharpens cortical bone and one tuned to the joint capsule and hip musculature, both reading the same slice.
Measure the alpha angle and coverage
Draw an angle across the femoral head-neck junction or a line across the acetabular rim and read the value in degrees, the same units a hip radiology report uses for cam and pincer morphology.
Spin up a 3D pelvis model
A pelvis CT’s isotropic voxels are enough on their own for the viewer to build coronal, sagittal, and a rotatable 3D render, no additional acquisition needed.
Making Sense Of The Report Wording
Hip CT reports lean on a handful of recurring phrases. “Alpha angle” is reported in degrees and describes how far the femoral head departs from a perfect sphere where it meets the neck; a wider angle points toward a cam lesion. “Rim overhang” or “acetabular coverage” describes how much the socket extends over the femoral head, which factors into whether the shape is read as pincer-type impingement or dysplastic under-coverage. “Subchondral cysts” and “sclerosis” are the bone changes that accompany advancing osteoarthritis, usually paired with a joint space measurement in millimeters. “Subchondral collapse” on a femoral head points toward avascular necrosis that has progressed past the earliest, reversible stage. A post-replacement report covers “component position”, checking the cup or stem against where it was implanted and flagging any lucent line that might mean it has started to loosen.
Where CT Stops And MRI Takes Over
Where CT wins outright is cortical bone: fracture lines through the acetabular columns, how well the pelvic ring lines up, hardware position, and healing all read clearly off a slice. What it cannot do is show the labrum, articular cartilage, or the earliest stage of avascular necrosis with any confidence — those stay an unremarkable gray until you switch to MRI's contrast-weighted sequences. A labral tear or an early osteonecrosis lesion routinely looks like nothing at all on a CT slice even though it is already symptomatic. That gap is why an acetabular fracture gets worked up with CT for the bone first, and an MRI gets added when a labral tear or early avascular necrosis still needs ruling in or out.
Supported Hip CT Formats
File Types
- DICOM (.dcm) — standard CT slice files
- ZIP archives — containing CT series
- Axial, coronal, and sagittal reconstructions
Technical Details
- Thin-slice and standard reconstructions
- 12-bit and 16-bit Hounsfield unit data
- All major CT manufacturer formats (Siemens, GE, Philips, Canon, Toshiba)
Frequently Asked Questions
Is this hip CT viewer free to use?
Yes, with no limit on how many slices you page through or how long you keep the pelvis study open. The credit charge, $10 per session, only applies once you ask the AI panel for a read.
Does the viewer measure the alpha angle for FAI?
Yes, an angle tool lets you draw across the femoral head-neck junction on the axial or radial reformat and reads the value in degrees, matching how a cam lesion is described in an FAI work-up.
Can I check acetabular coverage on a pelvis CT?
Yes. Bring up the coronal reformat across the acetabular rim under bone windowing and set the two sides side by side to compare how much each socket covers its femoral head.
Will this replace an MRI for a suspected labral tear?
No. The labrum and the earliest stage of avascular necrosis just don’t show up reliably on CT the way they do on MRI. Keep MRI in the plan whenever those are the actual question.
Is my hip CT study kept private?
Every pelvis DICOM file is decoded and drawn locally, inside your own browser tab. Close the tab or clear site data and the study is gone — nothing was ever uploaded.
Can the viewer build a 3D model of the pelvis from the CT?
Yes, on devices that can handle it. Pelvis CT comes in with isotropic voxels, which is exactly what the viewer needs to spin up a rotatable 3D pelvis alongside the flat reformats.
How large a hip CT series can it open?
A typical pelvis series runs a few hundred slices and opens instantly. Once you get past a thousand slices, plan on a device with 4GB of RAM or more to keep scrolling smooth.
See supported file and archive formats → for the complete list.
3D Rendering For Acetabular And Revision Planning
A pelvis series is almost always acquired as a genuine volumetric scan, which is what lets it reformat into MPR and 3D without losing detail along the way. Showing a surgeon how the acetabular columns have separated, how femoral version compares side to side, or where an implant sits is simply faster on a rotating pelvis render than on a stack of flat slices — though how sharp that render looks is still set by the slice thickness, spacing, and kernel the original scan used.
Learn how 3D DICOM viewing worksHip Imaging Focus
On Analyze My Hip, the viewer helps you inspect hip scans and connect image findings with common pain, impingement, arthritis, and labral injury questions.
Common hip findings
Review hip labral tears, femoroacetabular impingement, arthritis, avascular necrosis, bursitis, stress fracture, gluteal tendon findings, MRI soft-tissue detail, and CT or X-ray bone detail.
Prepare for hip review
Use the hip condition pages to understand whether a report is describing X-ray joint space narrowing, CT fracture or impingement morphology, MRI labrum and tendon findings, or mixed hip pain patterns.