[MINC-users] mincstats and ranges that exceed the volume value range

[Alex Zijdenbos]

Hi all,

Thought I'd post this here, in case there is discussion; but I noticed that
mincstats' histogram measures can be quite wrong if you happen to specify a
range to mincstats that exceeds the range of the volume.

An example:

$ mincstats -min -max -mean -median mni_icbm152_t1_tal_nlin_sym_09a.mnc
*** mincstats - reported min (0.0677952) doesn't equal header (0.0677952)
Min:               0.06779524744
Max:               97.32924302
Mean:              28.32028821
Median:            *11.22854638*

$ mincstats -min -max -mean -median *-ceil 1e6*
mni_icbm152_t1_tal_nlin_sym_09a.mnc
*** mincstats - reported min (0.0677952) doesn't equal header (0.0677952)
Min:               0.06779524744
Max:               97.32924302
Mean:              28.32028821
Median:            *500.0677626*

The reason for the massive change in the median is that the histogram
range/bins are apparently calculated based on the user-supplied range. I
would say that this is wrong, and that these should be clamped to the
actual range of the volume - especially since mincstats already has
-hist_{floor,ceil,range} options with which you could fully control these.

-- A