[MINC-users] MINC 1.0

[Andrew JANKE]

Morning all,

First, a big welcome to all those who have decided to stay with us so far,
from the inital subscription list of ~150, only 6 (so far!) have opted
out.

So now that the dust may have settled somewhat.... to bring everyone up to
date, I should mention that MINC 1.0 has finally been released!

It can be found at ftp://ftp.bic.mni.mcgill.ca/pub/minc/

A few small bugs have been fixed, a few additions to the volume_io API and
2 new utilities have been added since MINC 0.6.

   mincstats - Some of you may remember a little tool that came as part
                of N3 called volume_stats.  This functionality has now
                been incorporated into the core MINC tools.
               Suffice to say a few more features have also been added
                in the process!

   minccalc -  This is an entirely new tool designed for arbitrary
                voxel-by-voxel type math.  This functionality could
                be achieved in the past via multiple calls to mincmath
                however complex expressions sometimes required
                multiple temporary files that as we all know can lead to
                interpolation errors.

As such the mighty minccalc was born! An example usage to calculate
normalised absolute difference between two files might look something like
this...

    minccalc -expression "(abs(A[0]-A[1]))/avg(A)" one.mnc two.mnc out.mnc

ie:               abs(one.mnc-two.mnc)
       out.mnc =  --------------------
                  (one.mnc+two.mnc)/2


See the man pages for both of these for some more in depth examples.
Suffice to say, voxel-arithmetic just got a whole lot easier!

In the future all new versions of MINC or associated tools (from the MNI
anyhow) will be announced on this list first.


In other news, to complement this mailing list I have begun to update all
the current MINC documentation.  In the future I hope to have online
worked examples of common usuage of each of the core MINC tools (mincmath,
minclookup, mincreshape, mincresample, etc etc) so I welcome feedback as
to what people would like to see "how-to's" on.

A sneak preview of the API documentation can be found here:

   http://www.bic.mni.mcgill.ca/software/MDP/

Note: Not all the sections are complete so far.


Again, thanks to all of you for your interest.


Andrew Janke                   e-mail: rotor@bic.mni.mcgill.ca
Post-Doc                       http://www.cmr.uq.edu.au/~rotor/
McConnell Brain Imaging Center
Montreal Neurological Institute
Montreal (Canada)