A method facilitates viewing of DICOM medical images by providing a 16-bit DICOM image on a computer readable storage medium, text-converted metadata of the DICOM image and an html-compatible conversion of the DICOM pixel data on a computer readable storage medium. Pixel data of the DICOM image is converted by dividing the 16~bit image into two 8-bit color channels stored in an image referenced by a web page using a uniform resource locator. The two 8-bit color channels are later reassembled within a portable web browser according to instructions set forth in computer readable program code associated with the web page.
