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

[Andrew Janke]

> 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).

Indeed.. :)

Here's a "small" ~2GB mouse imaging dataset:

   http://caivm1.qern.qcif.edu.au/desktop.html?ds=1&plane=y&x=0.55&y=1.551&z=0.35&zoom=5

And then we get a bit bigger with a nigh on 200GB micro-CT:

   http://caivm1.qern.qcif.edu.au/desktop.html?ds=22&plane=y&x=0.009&y=0.017&z=-0.009&zoom=3

Once we get to restacked histology it goes mental (1TB), at this stage
we seem to hit the limits of what MINC/HDF5 can do in a reasonable
time frame and start to break the volume up although I now suspect
that this is a limitation of how the MINC2 compatibility layer was
coded. This was one of the major motivating things for me to
investigate a pure HDF5 only MINC. Vlad has done 99.9% of the work on
this for integration into ITK via minc-lite.

For now the results we get with minc-lite are a lot quicker than minc2
but it's still not quite there for large (1TB) datasets.

a