[MINC-development] MINC2 file with floating-point voxels and slice normalization

[Andrew Janke]

Peter wrote:
> Remember that in the original design of minc, there were
> only real numbers (conceptually) - storing as bytes or shorts has always
> just been a representational trick for fixed point. The real values are
> rescaled to fit in the integer range, potentially on a slice-by-slice basis,
> preserving the scaling info in the image max/min. Floating-point
> representations do not need any rescaling to fit, so none is done.

Thanks for the info Peter.

>> to float/double using MINC tools the slice max/mins are discarded.
>
> In the float/double case the slice max/mins are preserved for informational
> purposes (it is not necessary to read the whole image to know the range).

OK, good to know. Vlad, I vote that we discard this information on
conversion to float/double in MINC2/minc_lite. I'm not sure if still
having this information around was the reason why scaling was
implemented in MINC2 but it might have contributed.

I see no reason to keep it and add to any confusion.

ta


a