21 January 2010

writeNIfTI() is fully compatible with FSLView

With the NIfTI-1 header extensions the world is your oyster.  We decided that one use for such a capability is to keep an audit trail of all operations performed on the image data volume.  This is a key feature in the dcemriS4 package.  There are three main components to a NIfTI-1 header extension: esize, ecode and edata.  At first we arbitrarily set ecode = 1002 and further developed the software.  Turns out, FSLView is quite strict about the numbers used in ecode and it failed to accept our NIfTI-1 header extensions saved from R.  Looking at the file nifti1_io.h, the following ecodes have been defined:



Advice from the FSL team (thanks: Matt Webster and Dave Flitney) was for us to use ecode = 6 (ASCII) since the audit trail is text in XML format.  Now one can produce an example data volume



We now have a file "img_nifti.nii.gz" that is available to us and using a utility in FSL we can investigate the attributes of this file

% $FSLDIR/bin/fslhd img_nifti | grep 'vox_offset'
vox_offset     1168

and reading the file back into R allows us to interrogate the ecode via its S4 slot


20 January 2010

Remote download and viewing of brain atlas

The dcemriS4 package allows one to easily import and display NIfTI-1 class data sets. The following code takes the MNI152 brain atlas from the WWW and produces an orthographic display using the mid-axial, mid-sagittal and mid-coronal planes.