The VisAD visualization toolkit is a Java component library for interactive and collaborative visualization and analysis of numerical data. VisAD uses Bio-Formats to read many image formats, notably TIFF.

The visad.jar file has Bio-Formats bundled inside, so no further installation is necessary.

If you wish to read certain kinds of compressed DICOM files, you will need to set up the optional native libraries.

If you wish to read compressed SVS files, you will need to set up the optional native library.

It should be possible to use a newer version of Bio-Formats by putting the latest loci_tools.jar or bio-formats.jar before visad.jar in the class path. Alternately, you can create a "VisAD Lite" using the make lite command from VisAD source, and use the resultant visad-lite.jar, which is a stripped down version of VisAD without sample applications or Bio-Formats bundled in.