I talked this over with Rick and Ziad and found another option. Amira also exports .ply surface mesh files. These can be potentially converted to AFNI volumes use 3dSurfMask to convert the surface to a closed volume or 3dSurf2Vol to convert mesh points or differences between corresponding mesh points to volumes.
suma can display .ply files using suma -i_ply surface.ply. I don't know if this method has any advantage over the Analyze/DICOM methods, but it gives you another option.