Hi Slicer Community, I have a .nii file which is a 4D-gated cardiac CT but I am struggling to load it in Slicer in a way whereby I can watch the heart beating. Is there a specific workflow I need to follow. So far I have Add Data make sure ‘Volume’ is checked go to Sequences module But I am not seeing any of the green buttons for playing the sequence - they are all greyed out. It could be the case the file is missing the header or something? Happy to share the file if needed.

I would suggest making an nii.gz for each phase. These are read in normally. Then they are added to a Sequence. This definately works.

Do you still have the original DICOM image of the 4D cardiac CT? You can load that directly into Slicer using the DICOM module. We have refused to add better support for nifti, as it is such a problematic image file format (quite complex yet very limited). However, nowadays we could much more easily add new features and maintain them, so I’m leaning towards improving a few things - including enable reading/writing of 4D/5D nifti images.

Thanks all for the responses. What is unexpected is that I can load the .nii here and the sequence is recognised and played: BrainBrowser Volume Viewer v2.5.2 Is there anyone that might be willing to download the volume if I DMed a link, and try it to see if it is just my user error rather than an issue with the data itself?

Correct workflow for loading 4D CT cardiac data

Support

pieper (Steve Pieper (Isomics, Inc.)) September 11, 2026, 4:10pm 2

See this conversation for context: 4D NifTi flipped and rotated about 90-deg

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Correct workflow for loading 4D CT cardiac data

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