Horos for Windows: there isn’t one — and what to use instead

Why there is no Horos for Windows

Horos is the free, open-source descendant of OsiriX, and both were built specifically for macOS. The Horos team has said publicly that a Windows version isn’t on their roadmap, and the project is distributed as a Mac application only.

That leaves Windows users — which is most hospital and clinic PCs in the world — without a native Horos option. Running it through a virtual machine or a compatibility layer is fragile, unsupported, and usually impossible on a locked-down hospital computer where you can’t install anything.

What Windows users actually need

On a typical hospital or shared PC you can’t install software, you don’t have admin rights, and a patient has just handed you a study on a CD or USB. You need to open it, look at it, maybe measure something, and move on — in under a minute.

• Runs on Windows without installation or admin rights
• Opens studies straight from a CD, USB or folder
• Handles CT, MRI, X-ray, ultrasound and angiography
• Lets you measure and print a clean report

PortaDICOM: a portable viewer that runs on any Windows PC

PortaDICOM ships pre-loaded on a 2 TB SSD and runs directly from the drive — no installer, no admin rights. Plug it into any Windows PC, double-click, and open the study. It reads the common modalities and decodes the encodings real studies use (including JPEG-Lossless and JPEG-2000 angiography), with window/level presets, cine playback, and on-screen measurements.

Because the whole library lives on the SSD, you can also carry every case with you between clinics — search, compare and teach from one drive.

An honest comparison

Horos on a Mac offers advanced 3D, MPR and image-fusion tools that a portable review viewer doesn’t. PortaDICOM is intentionally a portable, Windows-friendly review tool — it is for review and records only, not for primary diagnosis. If your goal is to open and review studies on Windows without installing anything, that trade is usually the right one.