[MINC-users] mincaverage -avgdim result header

[Alex Zijdenbos]

Hello all,

I just noticed that 'mincaverage -avgdim' leaves lots of header
information in the resulting average for the dimension it averaged
out; which then causes trouble with mincinfo and the like. To me this
looks like a bug in mincaverage, in that when using -avgdim <dim> it
doesn't properly clean up the <dim>-related header attributes.

Specifically:

$ mincaverage -avgdim time test_pet.mnc test_pet_avg.mnc
$ mincinfo test_pet.mnc test_pet_avg.mnc
file: test_pet.mnc
image: signed__ short -32768 to 32767
image dimensions: time zspace yspace xspace
    dimension name         length         step        start
    --------------         ------         ----        -----
    time                        4        227.5          150
    zspace                     90            2            0
    yspace                    128           -2         -128
    xspace                    128           -2          128


file: test_pet_avg.mnc
image: signed__ short -32768 to 32767
image dimensions: zspace yspace xspace
    dimension name         length         step        start
    --------------         ------         ----        -----
    zspace                     90            2            0
    yspace                    128           -2         -128
    xspace                    128           -2          128

So that looks right; we seem to have lost the time dimension. However,
using this mincinfo call:

$ mincinfo -dimnames -dimlength time test_pet_avg.mnc
time xspace yspace zspace
4

Suddenly revives the time dimension. Using mincheader:

$ mincheader test_pet_avg.mnc | grep time
        time = 4 ;
        int time ;
                time:length = 4 ;
                acquisition:start_time = "20110207 154039" ;
                study:start_time = "154039" ;
        double time-width(time) ;
                time-width:dimorder = "time" ;
                time-width:varid = "MINC standard variable" ;
                time-width:vartype = "dim-width____" ;
                time-width:version = "MINC Version    1.0" ;
                time-width:spacing = "irregular" ;
                time-width:filtertype = "square____" ;
                        "Fri Mar 23 11:07:54 2012>>> mincaverage
-clobber -avgdim time test_pet.mnc test_pet_avg.mnc\n",
 time = 0 ;
 time-width = 300, 300, 300, 300 ;

I would say that most (if not all) of these time-dimension attributes
should have been removed?

-- Alex