[Insight-users] converting medical images from unsigned short to unsigned char

[Mark Wyszomierski]

Hello all,

I have some motion corrected (courtesy of ITK) image data taken from MRI images.
I wanted to display these images using VTK, namely display the images
as texture maps on a quad for hardware acceleration. These routines in
VTK (vtkImageActor) only accept image data of type unsigned char as
input.

Is it valid to rescale the original MRI data which is of type unsigned
short into an unsigned char data range for display? Won't this be
altering the original image data?

Thanks,
Mark