Medical Imaging (Q13756)

Medical images are produced by systems such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), computed tomography (CT) and positron emission tomography (PET) scanners. They are often three-dimensional, and sometimes also have a dimension that varies with time or orientation. Moreover, they typically include important metadata relating to the details of the scan and the image's spatial relationship with the scan subject. This information is stored with the images in one of several file formats designed for the domain. The packages in this task view are designed to read and write these files, visualize medical images and process them in various ways. Some of them are applicable to conventional images as well, and some general-purpose image-processing package can also be used with medical image data. The image intensities, stored per pixel or voxel (3D pixel), generally map naturally into an R array, which is a standard data structure and therefore suitable for interoperable working with base R and other code.