[MINC-development] Draft API for MINC 2.0

[John G. Sled]

On Tue, Jun 17, 2003 at 09:07:33AM +1000, Andrew Janke wrote:
> On Mon, 16 Jun 2003, Robert VINCENT wrote:
> 
> > > Are you really really sure you want to add more data types?  (COMPLEX, etc) I
> > > for one was happy with the idea of a 'vector_dimension/complex_vector' for these
> > > as it allowed a fair bit more flexibility.
> >
> > My assumption was that adding some intrinsic support for complex data
> > would be useful, and that we would ultimately allow arbitrarily-sized and
> > -structured voxel values.  So nothing would prevent you from continuing to
> > use a vector type.  Remember that 99% of the traditional MINC ways of
> > accomplishing things should continue to work!
> 
> True.  However if I were to write a viewer for all types of MINC data, it just
> got harder.  Currently all I have to worry about are 3D and 4D scalar files, how
> does one view a complex file?  or a structured file?  to my mind this sort of
> notion introduces breakage further down the lines as each and every command line
> tool will have to be more complex (pun :).
> 
> But don't let my rambling stop you!, you just might find yourselves re-writing
> mincresample, mincreshape, etc. ;)
> 

Hi Andrew,

What do you think of having a mechanism to make the complex or
structured data appear to be flat?  Perhaps this could be specified
when the file is opened and the MINC file could appear to have an
extra dimension.  I think mincreshape should be relatively easy to
modify to handle complex data and structured data, possibly with some
type conversion restrictions.  It is not clear what mincresample
should do in general with structured data.

John