A MATLAB® App Designer example that lets researchers and developers explore 3-D and 4-D medical image volumes interactively in MATLAB — without switching to a separate DICOM viewer. The FourPanelMedicalViewerApp app displays a medical volume simultaneously in three orthogonal 2-D slice views (transverse, sagittal, and coronal) and in a 3-D volume rendering, with support for file/folder/PACS import, synchronized crosshair navigation, multiple 3-D rendering styles, and 4-D time-series playback. Because it is delivered as an App Designer example, you can extend it with your own UI components — intensity windowing, ROI drawing, custom measurements — to fit the visualization tasks in your own workflow.
- Multi-source data import — Load medical volumes from single files (DICOM, NIfTI, NRRD), from a folder containing a DICOM series, or from a PACS server through the embedded
PACSConnectionApp. - Synchronized orthogonal views — Visualize a medical volume in transverse, sagittal, and coronal 2-D slice viewers together with a 3-D volume rendering, all kept in sync.
- Interactive crosshair navigation — Drag the crosshair in any 2-D panel to update slice indices across all views. Scroll through slices using the mouse wheel or the vertical slider.
- 3-D rendering styles — Switch between
VolumeRendering,MaximumIntensityProjection, andGradientOpacityrendering. - 4-D time-series playback — Automatically detect 4-D time-varying volumes (for example, cardiac cine or dynamic contrast-enhanced data) and step through frames using previous/next buttons, a slider, or animated playback.
- Reusable custom UI components — Use the
FourPanelMedicalViewerandImageStackScrubbercomponents in standalone mode or embed them in your own apps.
MathWorks Products (https://www.mathworks.com)
Requires MATLAB release R2026b or newer.
- Clone or download this repository.
- Open MATLAB and set the repository folder as the current working folder, or add it to the MATLAB path.
- Open the
ImageStackScrubber.mlappandFourPanelMedicalViewer.mlappcustom UI components in App Designer. In the Designer tab of the App Designer toolstrip, select Configure for Apps, then select OK in the dialog. When the metadata-updated success message appears, select Add to Path. Repeat for both components.
Open FourPanelMedicalViewerApp.m in App Designer or see the guided walkthrough on the documentation page.
| File | Description |
|---|---|
FourPanelMedicalViewerApp.m |
Main app that assembles the toolstrip, working area, and data-import workflows. |
FourPanelMedicalViewer.mlapp |
Custom UI component providing four synchronized panels (transverse, sagittal, coronal, 3-D). |
ImageStackScrubber.mlapp |
Custom UI component providing a single-plane 2-D slice viewer with a vertical slider and crosshair interaction. |
PACSConnectionApp.m |
Dialog app for connecting to a PACS server, querying, and retrieving DICOM data. |
PACSConfigManager.m |
Utility class for managing PACS connection configurations. |
FourPanelMedicalViewerApp.xml |
Main app component layout data |
PACSConnectionApp.xml |
PACS Connection App component layout data |
The license is available in the license.txt file in this repository.
Copyright 2026 The MathWorks, Inc.
