[MINC-development] mincstats

[Peter NEELIN]

On Sun, 8 Jun 2003, Steve ROBBINS wrote:

> I attach, therefore, a proposed change that will bark if you specify
> -mask without specifying the mask values.  I haven't committed this,
> so please speak up before I do.

'Looks good.

> Incidentally, this thread has made me realize that I don't know what
> folks mean by the term "binary mask".  I have always thought in terms
> of C boolean values.  For me, I would interpret the set of zero voxels
> as the background, and non-zero as the foreground.  I get the feeling
> that some would view voxels with value "1" as the foreground, and
> everything else as background.  What *do* you mean by "binary mask"?

I suppose that binary mask means what you would expect: include all that
voxels for which the mask evaluates to true. The mask is an operation
applied to an input file. In mincstats, the operation can be
either round(maskfile) == n, or min <= maskfile <= max. So the binary
mask is not the mask file alone, but rather op(maskfile). BTW, the first
operation mentioned is very useful for selecting a mask out of a file full
of labels.

            Peter
----
            Peter Neelin (neelin@bic.mni.mcgill.ca)