[Insight-users] Questions about metaimage headers

[Jolinda Smith]

Hello,

I have a few questions about metaimage headers. The first is: must the
metaimage header reside in the same directory as the files it points to?

Secondly, I'd like to store the following information: series and study
UIDs, rescale slope/intercept and window width/center  Can I simply
define my own fields for this info?

Looking at the documentation at
http://tolkien.rad.unc.edu/technologies/MetaImage/MetaIO-Introduction.do
c, I see that there are metaimage tags available for ID and ParentID,
but these are type int. Might I suggest that these fields be changed to
type "string"? Since a metaimage header would usually be used for a
whole series, I assume these are meant for the "Series number" and
"Study ID" DICOM tags. However, "Study id" is not a mandatory DICOM tag
and is often not provided. Also, these two fields are simply numbers and
are not as useful as the series and study unique identifiers, which are
strings.

Also, in the file "metaImage.h" I see this:

    //    SequenceID(...)
    //       Optional Field
    //       DICOM designation of this image relative to other images
    //         acquired at the same time
    const float * SequenceID(void) const;
    float SequenceID(int _i) const;
    void  SequenceID(const float * _sequenceID);
    void  SequenceID(int _i, float _value);

The sequence information in a DICOM file is all character strings, and I
see no strings here. It also doesn't really tell you what this comment
implies. Is this really talking about the series number? Why is it a
float?

Thanks,

Jolinda