Honest comparison
Read Your Scan vs Claude
Can Claude read my MRI or X-ray?
Partly. Claude can describe a screenshot of a scan — and Claude is the model that writes the Deep Analysis on Read Your Scan. What the Claude app cannot do is open a DICOM study: it sees one flattened slice, not the hundreds of slices, original grayscale depth and metadata your radiologist reads on.
If you have a scan on a disc and a report you cannot read, pasting a screenshot into a chat window is the free thing to try first — and you should know exactly what it does and does not do before you pay anyone, us included.
Full disclosure before anything else: Claude is the model behind the Deep Analysis. When you buy a reading here, a Claude Opus is very often the thing that reads it and writes it. So this page is not "our model beats Claude" — it is what happens to a medical study on the way into a chat window, versus on the way in here.
One exam $9. Three for $24 — $8 each, 11% off. Credits never expire, no subscription.
- Name, IDs and dates stripped in your browser, before upload
- The 3D viewer is free, with or without an account
- Your doctor opens the shared link without an account
- Informational, not a diagnosis — nobody licensed signs it
What can a chat window not do with a medical scan?
The row that matters is the first one: what actually reaches the model. A chat window can only be handed a flattened picture, and every limitation below follows from that one fact.
What it opens
A flattened screenshot. The Claude app does not open a DICOM study, so the grayscale window your radiologist reads on is gone before the model sees anything.
The DICOM study itself, at its own bit depth and grayscale window — the data your radiologist reads on. Or a NIfTI file, or a photo of an X-ray film, quality-checked before anything is charged.
How much of it
Whatever images you pasted — typically one slice out of several hundred, picked by you rather than by what is diagnostic.
Every diagnostic series in the study, slice by slice, with the slices chosen across the volume rather than wherever you happened to scroll. Which series were read, and how many slices, is written into the report.
Which side is which
Guessed from the picture. A chest radiograph mirrors the patient, and left-to-right reading gets the side wrong often enough to matter.
Read from the file’s own metadata and projection, not inferred from the picture. Right stays right.
The model behind it
Claude, whichever version Anthropic is serving that day — the same family that writes the reading here, handed a screenshot instead of a study.
A roster compared on real studies with a known diagnosis — Claude Opus, Gemini, and Google’s MedGemma 1.5, a gated medical-imaging model no consumer chat window can reach. The exact version is stored with every analysis.
What you walk away with
A few paragraphs in a chat thread — hedged, unsourced, gone when the thread scrolls, and nothing your doctor can open.
A written report: every finding in plain language with a severity score, each one clickable and placed on the scan in a 3D viewer, plus the specific questions worth asking — on a private link you can send to your doctor, revocable any time.
Against your radiologist
Only what you typed out of the report by hand, compared against a picture the model half-saw.
The reading is deliberately blind to the radiologist’s report. Add the report afterwards and every sentence in it is matched to what the AI saw on the same images — including anything only one of them mentions.
None of this makes the reading a diagnosis. It is an informational explanation of what is visible in your images, and it does not replace your radiologist or your doctor.
When should you just use the chatbot instead?
A comparison page that says "always pay us" is worth nothing. Three cases where you should close this page and go back to the chat, for free:
You want a word explained
"What does subchondral sclerosis mean?" is a vocabulary question, not an imaging question. Any good chatbot answers it well, and so does our free glossary.
You already have the report and trust it
If your radiologist has answered your question and you only want it in plainer words, paste the text — not the images. That is a language task, and language is what these models are best at.
You have no imaging files at all
If all you were given is a printout with no disc, no USB and no film to photograph, there is nothing here for the reader to open. Ask the hospital for your images first — they are yours.
How does Read Your Scan read a scan instead?
Four steps, and you can stop after the first two without paying anything.
- 01
Drop the whole study
The DICOM folder from the hospital CD or USB, a ZIP of it, a NIfTI file, or a photo of an X-ray. Names, IDs and dates are stripped in your browser before anything leaves it.
- 02
Look at it yourself, free
The 3D viewer opens the study — every series, scroll and window it however you like. This costs nothing and always will.
- 03
The reading
The study goes to the reader that measurement picked for that kind of study. Findings come back in plain language, scored, and pinned to the images they came from.
- 04
Put it next to the report
Add the radiologist’s report and see the two side by side on the same images — the agreements, and the places where only one of them said something.
Common questions
- So you are just a wrapper?
- The reading model is not ours, and we say so on every page that mentions it. What is ours is everything around it: opening a real DICOM study, choosing which series and slices are diagnostic, keeping laterality straight from the metadata, scoring each finding, placing it back on the image it came from, and matching it against your radiologist’s report. A chat window does none of that, and it is where the answer quality actually comes from.
- Can I not just upload the DICOM files to the chatbot?
- You can upload them; they will not be read as images. A .dcm file is not a picture format a consumer chat window renders, and a hospital study is usually hundreds of them in nested folders. What people end up pasting is a screenshot of one slice, taken from a viewer, already flattened to 8-bit.
- Is this a diagnosis?
- No. It is an informational, plain-language explanation of what is visible in your images. Nobody licensed signs it, and it does not replace your radiologist or your doctor. New or worsening symptoms are a reason to contact a doctor quickly, whatever any reading says.
- What does it cost, and is there a subscription?
- The 3D viewer is free. A reading costs one credit: $9 for a single exam, or $24 for three ($8 each). Credits are bought once, never expire, and there is no subscription.
Read Your Scan Editorial Team · 2026-09-09
Read Your Scan is an informational tool. It is not a medical device, it does not diagnose, and it does not replace a radiologist or your doctor. Product names belong to their owners and this page is not endorsed by them.