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

[Peter Neelin]

On Jan 19, 2013 9:13 AM, "Vladimir S. FONOV" <vladimir.fonov at gmail.com>
wrote:

> I think these relics of the past have to go, right now it takes much more
time to extract the right slice from the dataset (especially if it is a
histological volume located on NFS server) then actually dynamically
calculating min and max range of the memory buffer.

FWIW, I don't feel strongly one way or another (since I am no longer a MINC
user), but you might want to have a discussion with John before changing
things. As John mentions, it can be helpful in certain applications to be
able get range information for a large multi-dimensional dataset without
having to read it all first (e.g. on-demand loading). In my experience, IO
speed limitations can be a significant obstacle for things like time to
display first image for large datasets, so you want to be able to quickly
get any required meta-data (such as dataset range for  window level
initialization). Note that valid min/max would be sufficient for this
unless you are looking at volumes in a 4 or 5D file. Perhaps John could
give examples where this is useful. In my world, we still top out at around
1-10 GB for big individual datasets, but research data always seemed to be
1-2 orders of magnitude bigger (is that still true? I'm a bit afraid to
ask). Ignoring the memory requirements, with even fast IO the load time
could be very annoying. All that to say that I can still see these concepts
as being potentially useful. They certainly are in my business (distributed
radiology) although we are more about viewing than large-scale image
processing.

Peter
--
Peter Neelin
peter.neelin at gmail.com
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