Q: Hi All, I seem to have hit a wall, and need some suggestions. I have a 4D volume (time * z * y * x) which I need to blur. No problem, I think. So, I do the following:

(1) mincreshape to split the 4D volume into a series of 3D volumes
(2) mincblur each separately
(3) mincconcat to slap it all together again
Here’s the problem: mincreshape actually produces a 4D volume with “time” the slowest varying dimension and equal to 1. This is precisely what I want, since this preserves my time data (eg, time start, time-width). This is important, since my times are *not* fixed. mincblur then comes along and, more or less, corrupts the volume in that the time dimension is still in the header — but it’snow as the fastest varying dimension, and all of its variable info has been removed. At this point, the mincconcat stage is pointless, in that I have now lost my time info.

What’s the best way to get around this, while retaining my “irregular” time information? Suggestions? Ideas?
http://www.bic.mni.mcgill.ca/pipermail/minc-users/2009-February/002363.html

A: Have you tried fmr_preprocess? It’s not part of the standard MINC install, but it is available on most BIC machines. We normally use it to motion-correct and blur fMRI data. But you can turn off the alignment part with the -noalign option, and specify the amount of blurring in millimeters with the -fwhm option:

/usr/local/mni/bin/fmr_preprocess -noalign -fwhm 6 input.mnc

This script should preserve the time info. Nonetheless, you should verify the output.