Extract text from Scanned documents (SCAN)
To convert SCAN Scans to another format, you need Soarian Clinicals or other Data software.
To convert other file formats to the "Generated Scan Output" file type, you need software like Soarian Clinicals or a similar tool.
The .SCAN extension is highly fragmented and serves as a generic suffix applied by dozens of distinct hardware and software systems to denote the output of a scanning process. In medical environments, software like Soarian Clinicals saves clinical document images as .SCAN files, which are usually just standard TIFF images in disguise. In the cybersecurity field, HCL AppScan generates web application security vulnerability reports as .SCAN files, which are actually structured ZIP archives. Additionally, specialized hardware - including Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR), mass spectrometers, and CT scanners - use the extension to store proprietary, raw binary data dumps.
The main disadvantage of the .SCAN format is its extreme ambiguity. Because the file extension does not identify the underlying internal data structure, your operating system will not know which application to launch when you double-click it. Proprietary scientific and medical .SCAN files are entirely vendor-locked, requiring expensive, highly specialized software licenses to interpret the data. This makes sharing records with clients, patients, or external researchers practically impossible without prior conversion.
To make these files accessible, you must identify their internal structure and convert them to standard formats. For clinical documents or images, convert to PDF for reliable archiving, or JPG and WEBP for web sharing. For security scan reports, extract the contents to readable text or XML.
Convert.Guru analyzes your SCAN file, detects the exact format, and lets you read the text inside.
Users also converted PDF, JPG, JPEG, DOCX, PNG, JFIF, TIF, BMP, HEIC, XLSX, ZIP, CRDOWNLOAD and SKP files.
If you want to convert SCAN file to PDF or TEXT, you can use Soarian Clinicals or similar software from the "Hardware and Software Output" category. In the File menu, look for Save As… or Export….
To convert files to SCAN, try Soarian Clinicals or another comparable tool in the "Hardware and Software Output" category.
The history of Convert.Guru began over 25 years ago in California with Tom Simondi’s file-format database. A former contributor to Space Shuttle development and a software pioneer of the 1980s, Simondi established a trusted resource for file type analysis that was even referenced by Microsoft Windows XP. Today, we use modern technology to process and convert thousands of file formats while continually improving our SCAN converter.